Tag: Trump

Trump keeps saying, in his usual random way, that the virus wuz maed in a labb by the Chyneez. Fauci says there’s no reason to think so.

Now, before we play the game of “he said, he said” remember this: Only one of these two people is a world-renowned infectious disease expert. And it’s not Donald Trump.

Well, yes, but that’s only the barely visible tip of the iceberg of the difference between the two. Fauci is a world-renowned infectious disease expert, and a trained scientist, and a grownup. Trump is a world-renowned liar and hustler.

Fauci and people like Fauci have a habit of not just making shit up without even pausing to ask if there’s any reason to think it’s true or not. Trump and people like Trump have the opposite habit – the habit of just making shit up whenever they feel like it without pausing to ask if there’s any reason to think it’s true or not. This contrasting pair of habits is the core of the difference between them.

Trump is before anything else a marketer. Trump sells shit. Trump wants you to buy his shit. That is basically the sum total of what Trump wants. He doesn’t care if what he’s selling is good shit or bad shit; all he wants is for you to give him a lot of money for it.

Trump wants everybody to buy what he’s selling, and that want determines pretty much everything else about him. He has obviously never in his life formed the habit of thinking about what he’s saying, and of considering whether it’s true or not, and whether he can offer any actual reason to think it’s true or not. He’s no more formed that habit than he’s formed a habit of walking on ceilings. He’s never even conceived of such a thing. He doesn’t know what it is to check his own claims for evidence or justification; he thinks his mere assertion is all that’s required.

He manages to think this while also thinking everything anyone else says is wide open to challenge from him, often of the most assertive kind. He can form the thought that what other people say is false, but he can’t form the thought about what he says. Why? Because he’s a marketer, and because he’s very stupid, and probably also because he’s a psychopath.

Trump weighs in on the gun-toting “protest” yesterday.

What would Trump be saying if 200 lefty protesters carrying assault rifles had gathered on Pennsylvania Avenue, just yards from the White House, with signs saying “TYRANTS GET THE ROPE” and similar exhilarating calls to action?

Not, I’m guessing, “These are very good people, but they are angry.” I don’t think he would be saying he should give a little. I don’t think he’d be saying he should see them, talk to them, make a deal.

Trump is tired of all this pampering of children, he wants them to go back to school now.

President Donald Trump on Monday urged the nation’s governors to “seriously consider” reopening schools as part of his push to restart the economy, though many states have already recommended against resuming the school year.

“Some of you might start thinking about school openings, because a lot of people are wanting to have school openings. It’s not a big subject, young children have done very well in this disaster that we’ve all gone through,” Trump told the governors on a teleconference call, according to audio of the call obtained by CNN.

Huh? It’s not a big subject? It is if any of them are your kids, I bet.

He continued, “So a lot of people are thinking about the school openings. And I think it’s something, Mike (Pence), they can seriously consider and maybe get going on it.”

…

Trump, Pence and other task force officials on Monday’s call outlined the administration’s testing blueprint and then spent much of the hour-long call fielding praise and thanks, reopening plan updates, and a few questions from the governors. Trump repeatedly urged them to get in the queue to ask questions by dialing “hashtag two.”

In other words it was largely a waste of time.

The President, who owns a hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, asked Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, whether he had made a decision on opening his state “and the Strip, etc., etc., with all your hotels.”

Or rather…all Trump’s hotel.

A Las Vegas re-opening, Trump said, “will be a big thing.”

Yeah? I would say it will be about the smallest thing imaginable. Who cares? It’s not about food or housing or health or safety or education or anything else that matters – it’s just about gambling and “shows.”

Trump lamented media coverage at multiple times during the call, saying his efforts “probably will never be recognized, but maybe it will, you never know.”

If it does it will be a “big thing.”

If only he wouldn’t ad lib. It wouldn’t change anything or fix anything of importance, but still – if only he would stop doing that.

Starting at 27 seconds:

Reading in the robotic monotone he reads everything:

While we mourn the tragic loss of life

Then the pause – the looking up – the tilt of the head – the blink – and the ad lib:

And you can’t mourn it any stronger than we’re mourning it.

MAKE.IT.STOP.

He is saying, over and over and over again, that he has absolute and total power. In those words. In the face of journalists saying no actually he doesn’t. He just keeps shouting them down and saying yes he does. It’s scary.

Those spiteful self-interested turds.

Vice President Mike Pence has blocked Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, as well as other top U.S. health officials, from appearing on CNN following the network’s decision to not air the White House coronavirus press briefings in full.

Will they send them to bed without dessert next? Take away their allowance? Say they can’t go to the picnic?

“When you guys cover the briefings with the health officials then you can expect them back on your air,” a spokesman for the vice president told CNN.

Trump and the White House Coronavirus Task Force, led by Pence, have been giving daily briefings to the press for several weeks after rising numbers of Americans have been infected. A CNN executive said that the network has sometimes cut away from the briefings after Trump speaks, and turns to a panel to fact-check the president. However, the network usually broadcasts only the president’s question-and-answer session.

Trump tells lie after lie after lie at those “briefings” which are mostly campaign rallies. Trump and his gang have no business withholding what Fauci can tell us in an attempt to force news outlets to broadcast Trump’s lies. It’s fucking outrageous.

The New York Times, another outlet that has been a target of the Trump administration’s ire, stopped airing the briefings on its website entirely.

“We stopped doing that because they were like campaign rallies,” Elisabeth Bumiller, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, told the Washington Post. “The health experts often have interesting information, so we’re very interested in that, but the president himself often does not.”

The president himself almost never does, is more like it.

I just want to underline this, even though I said it yesterday when he did the press rally. ABC News reports:

Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents.

The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. It raised alarms because an out-of-control disease would pose a serious threat to U.S. forces in Asia — forces that depend on the NCMI’s work. And it paints a picture of an American government that could have ramped up mitigation and containment efforts far earlier to prepare for a crisis poised to come home.

Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event,’ one of the sources said of the NCMI’s report. ‘It was then briefed multiple times to’ the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House.

November. Huh.

The Guardian, quoting this story, comments:

This news follows reports that Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, wrote memos starting in late January warning of a potential coronavirus pandemic with catastrophic consequences for Americans’ health and finances.

The president claimed yesterday that he had never seen Navarro’s memos, but their existence undermines his defense of the federal government’s early response to the pandemic, which has been widely criticized.

Here’s what I want to underline: Trump seems to think that claiming he never saw the memos lets him off the hook. It does the opposite. It’s his job to see them, and to take them in and understand their meaning and act accordingly. That’s what he’s there for. That’s the job he decided to go after, and it is his obligation to do it. He swore an oath to do it. He’s not there to compose angry stupid tweets and shout at reporters and tell evil lies. He’s there to read the memos and do what needs to be done. His claim that he never saw them is simply an admission that he’s not even slightly doing the job he swore an oath to do.

He’s going to kill every last one of us.

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.

Yesterday Chuck Schumer asked Trump to streamline the process for mandating production to deal with the pandemic. Trump’s response was to send this foul letter:

Dear Senator Schumer:

Thank you for your Democrat public relations letter and incorrect sound bites, which are wrong in every way.

As you are aware, Vice President Pence is in charge of the Task Force. By almost all accounts, he has done a spectacular job.

The Defense Production Act (DPA) has been consistently used by my team and me for the purchase of billions of dollars’ worth of equipment, medical supplies, ventilators, and other related items. It has been powerful leverage, so powerful that companies generally do whatever we are asking, without even a formal notice. They know something is coming, and that’s all they need to know.

A “senior military officer” is in charge of purchasing, distributing, etc. His name is Rear Admiral John Polowczyk. He is working 24 hours a day, and is highly respected by everyone. If you remember, my team gave you this information, but for public relations purposes, you choose to ignore it.

We have given New York many things, including hospitals, medical centers, medical supplies, record numbers of ventilators, and more. You should have had New York much better prepared than you did, and as Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx said yesterday, New York was very late in its fight against the virus. As you are aware, the Federal Government is merely a back-up for state governments. Unfortunately, your state needed far more of a back-up than most others.

If you spent less time on your ridiculous impeachment hoax, which went haplessly on forever and ended up going nowhere (except increasing my poll numbers), and instead focused on helping the people of New York, then New York would not have been so completely unprepared for the “invisible enemy.” No wonder AOC and others are thinking about running against you in the primary. If they did, they would likely win.

Fortunately, we have been working with your state and city governments, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill DeBlasio, to get the job done. You have been missing in action, except when it comes to the “press.” While you have stated that you don’t like Andrew Cuomo, you ought to start working alongside him for the good of all New Yorkers.

I’ve known you for many years, but I never knew how bad a Senator you are for the state of New York, until I became President.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call. Or, in the alternative, call Rear Admiral Polowczyk.

Sincerely yours,

Donald J. Trump

What changed that blob of vanilla pudding known as Trump’s “mind”?

Pictures, and graphs, and the fact that people he actually knows have the virus.

“We’re thinking that around Easter that’s going to be your spike. That’s going to be the highest point we think, and then it’s going to start coming down from there,” Trump said Monday on “Fox & Friends.” “The worst that can happen is you do it too early and all of a sudden it comes back. That makes it more difficult.”

Yes, but people were telling him that all along, and he ignored them.

The bleak forecasts were carried into the Oval Office by Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, who displayed to Trump projections that, on the low end, could yield 100,000 American deaths from COVID-19. One model showed that deaths could have soared past 2 million had there been no mitigation measures.

“We showed him the data. He looked at the data. He got it right away. It was a pretty clear picture,” Fauci told CNN on Monday.

No, he didn’t get it right away. This past weekend is not “right away.” Right away would have been weeks ago, not three days ago.

Trump mused to reporters Saturday about a quarantine of New York, as well as parts of New Jersey and Connecticut, blindsiding their governors and raising questions about federal authority.

Even if the measure was unenforceable, Trump thought it could be a signal to supporters elsewhere that he was walling off a virus hot zone comprised of three Democratic states. But Fauci and other advisers persuaded him that it would accomplish little except ignite worry.

Aw too bad. It would have been so awesome to see “Democratic states” consigned to doom while “Republican states” flourished like the green bay tree.

States that voted Trump get what they need. States that didn’t vote Trump can just choke on their own blood.

There may be a cause and effect thing here. Early this morning Nancy Pelosi told Jake Tapper that Trump is fiddling while people are dying.

So naturally, being the disordered toxic narcissist he is, he decided to show us how fiddly he can be.

It’s not just god who isn’t built for this, it’s also Trump.

The pain and hardship that the United States is only beginning to experience stem from a crisis that the president is utterly unsuited to deal with, either intellectually or temperamentally… The coronavirus pandemic has created the conditions that can catalyze a destructive set of responses from an individual with Trump’s characterological defects and disordered personality.

Yes but he pisses off the liberals, so it’s all worth it.

The qualities we most need in a president during this crisis are calmness, wisdom, and reassurance; a command of the facts and the ability to communicate them well; and the capacity to think about the medium and long term while carefully weighing competing options and conflicting needs. We need a leader who can persuade the public to act in ways that are difficult but necessary, who can focus like a laser beam on a problem for a sustained period of time, and who will listen to—and, when necessary, defer to—experts who know far more than he does. We need a president who can draw the nation together rather than drive it apart, who excels at the intricate work of governing, and who works well with elected officials at every level. We need a chief executive whose judgment is not just sound, but exceptional.

But that kind of chief executive wouldn’t piss off the liberals, so forget it. A pandemic is a small price to pay for the joy of pissing off the liberals.

The thing to understand about Donald Trump is that putting others before self is not something he can do, even temporarily. His attempts to convey facts that don’t serve his perceived self-interest or to express empathy are forced, scripted, and always short-lived, since such reactions are alien to him.

And that’s perpetually hard to grasp fully because it’s so alien to most people. Selfishness isn’t rare, but the complete inability to see past the self is.

This president does not have the capacity to listen to, synthesize, and internalize information that does not immediately serve his greatest needs: praise, fealty, adoration. “He finds it intolerable when those things are missing,” a clinical psychologist told me. “Praise, applause, and accolades seem to calm him and boost his confidence. There’s no room for that now, and so he’s growing irritable and needing to create some way to get some positive attention.”

I have a suggestion for that. He could resign.

Trump is restless. Trump wants all this to stop now. Trump thinks two weeks are MORE than enough, because that’s what he wants.

“WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” Trump tweeted late Sunday night. “AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”

SHOUTING AT US SO THAT WE WOULD KNOW HE REALLY MEANT IT.

Aides say Trump is itching for the guidelines to be eased when the 15-day period ends a week from Monday, but realistically there are few health experts who think that’s enough time to know whether the measures he announced last week– including recommending closing schools, limiting gatherings and keeping at least 6 feet of distance between individuals — will suffice.

So what?! There’s an election approaching!

The dynamic has led to a robust internal debate over how best to balance the actual health of the country — with potentially hundreds of thousands of lives at stake — with its economic health.

By “robust internal debate” they of course mean screaming tantrums.

Kiss the ring or die.

“should you fail”…meaning, we’ll stand here and watch while you’re swamped by the pandemic, and then we’ll bury you. Are we generous or what?!

Lying scumbag.

That’s a lot of lies in a small space.