President Donald Trump's Twitter feed is a more accurate reflection of his positions and beliefs than his White House press briefings. Since the very beginning of the coronavirus crisis the President has made clear he doesn't believe it is a crisis, has worked to minimize the amount of testing that can be done, and worked to spread falsehoods and outright lies in an attempt to make Americans believe the pandemic is not a massive health emergency. It is.
So perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that Sunday morning Trump kicked off the day with a lie. He retweeted this absolutely false claim by his re-election campaign's national press secretary. No legitimate health expert would oppose testing as many people as possible to help slow the spread of coronavirus, if there were enough tests. But the Trump administration made sure there aren't.
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But McEnay's tweet isn't just bluster, it's a lie.
There are not one million or four million coronavirus tests available, that can be processed. There are tests that don't work, there are tests the CDC created, sent out, then directed the medical community to not use because they are invalid. Bottom line: The U.S. has reportedly performed less than 20,000 tests as of Saturday.
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Trump's next tweet showed what he actually cares about:
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Then he shared this lie. Student loan interest is not being waived, as The New York Times reports. Student loans still have to be paid, and even the amount due isn't changing. The only difference is the amount of the payment will now, temporarily, be applied to the principal – the amount borrowed – and not to pay off interest accrued. One caveat:
"When borrowers pause their monthly payments because of a hardship — a status known as forbearance — the interest normally continues to pile up until they can start paying again," the Times notes. "Now, no interest will accrue as long as the waiver is in effect. This is true both for people already in forbearance and for those who may be soon."
Trump posted several tweets praising Trump, then this one showing the right wing war against Hillary Clinton is thriving:
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And then, finally, this atrocity:
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Given the coronavirus crisis, the intentional mishandling of the pandemic by President Trump, his administration's daily inept actions making the disaster even worse, and Trump's politicization of, well, everything, many were furious when he spewed lies, threw partisan grenades, then tried to hide behind a shield of religion – one that he himself constructed.
Donald Trump’s cavalier handshaking, nose-picking and other dangerous behaviors aren't limited to himself and his circle in the time of the novel coronavirus.
Team Trump is openly hostile to the health and welfare of workers on the front lines in containing the deadly COVID-19.
Hospital workers, airport screeners and others aren’t just caving in like spineless Trump toadies bowing to their Great Leader.
Nurses Doubt It
Trump & Co. won’t even take an obvious step to quickly obtain safety gear.
An acute shortage of N95 respirator masks prompted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend a looser, less effective surgical mask.
We need to be as protective as possible of healthcare workers because unless contained the pandemic will explode, overwhelming our hospitals.
Surgical face masks “do not protect the wearer from exposure because there’s not a seal around the face,” said Lisa Baum. She is an Occupational Health and Safety representative for the New York State Nurses Association.
“An N-95 respirator is made from different material, which has more filtering. And you have to be fit-tested to wear it to make sure you have a good seal...,” she said.
Pat Kane, the nurse association executive director, said the government should look into other stocks of N95s.
Construction Companies
First place to look: construction companies and industrial operations with deadly dust. Five million Americans workers wear respirator masks every day, according to the federal Department of Labor.
We need to be as protective as possible of healthcare workers because unless contained the pandemic will explode, overwhelming our hospitals.
Hospitals in Los Angeles locked up masks because many people, including patients, were randomly taking them.
Wearing a surgical mask instead of a respirator mask could mean the difference between getting sick or staying healthy to treat others. It also could mean life or death, both for older doctors, nurses and others as well as patients.
Not Just Nurses
Federal prison workers, law enforcement agencies and uniformed Transportation Safety Administration staff are among the federal workers at risk just from doing their jobs.
Consider the plight of airport screeners. The Trump administration refuses to provide airport screeners with proper health safety equipment. That concern that took on added urgency when four screeners at the San Jose airport tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Then another tested positive in Orlando. It is certain many more are or will be infected.
On March 10 the union representing TSA officers asked for N95 masks for screeners. David Pekoske, a retired Coast Guard vice admiral and Trump’s Transportation Services Administration boss, said no. The screeners have no obvious leverage because they lack full collective bargaining rights. A House-passed bill granting these basic worker rights languishes in the Senate.
Trump Rates 0
This crisis shows Trump would never have been hired as a CEO or even junior executive based on the standards Corporate America uses to find talent.
Korn-Ferry, the consulting firm that says it has judged 70 million executives, accesses six skills and behaviors for crisis management:
Anticipate– what lies ahead
Navigate–course correct in real-time
Communicate–continually
Listen–to what you don’t want to hear
Learn–from experience to apply in the future
Lead–improve yourself to elevate others
Trump rates 0. He is actively hostile to listening to what he does not want to hear. That is what is putting front-line workers at risk and, in turn, anyone who develops the novel coronavirus.
The following contains spoilers from "The Hunt," which you might as read anyway because it's time better spent than watching the movie.President Donald Trump's supporters aren't victims, they're victimizers. Shame on "The Hunt" for pandering to one of their most cherished fantasies – that they are persecuted.
I felt the need to begin this article with those two sentences because "The Hunt," a new horror film directed by Craig Zobel ("Compliance," "Z for Zachariah") and written by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof ("Lost," "Star Trek Into Darkness"), tells the story of liberal elites who kidnap 12 conservatives — heavily implied to be Trump supporters since they're often referred to as "deplorables" — in order to hunt them for sport.
There isn't much in the way of plot in "The Hunt." The Trump supporters are picked off one by one until only two survivors remain (played by "GLOW" star Betty Gilpin and Wayne Duvall) and they turn the tables on the liberal elites (the leader is played by Oscar winner Hilary Swank). There are a couple of plot twists thrown into the narrative to give the illusion of cleverness, but the film's entire story could otherwise fit on the back of a postcard. None of the kills are particularly memorable, all of the characters are two-dimensional stereotypes, and the pacing is so brisk that the movie feels like it's over before it has had a chance to start. Even if "The Hunt" were completely apolitical, it would still be mediocre and forgettable.
Alas, "The Hunt" is very much about politics — namely, validating right-wingers who desperately want to believe they are among the wronged of the world. While Zobel has said that the movie's goal is to "poke at both sides of the aisle equally," there are three problems with that statement. The first is that an early draft of the script reportedly depicted working-class conservatives as the heroes, suggesting that the film always had a pro-conservative agenda. (Although, it should be noted that Gilpin's character Crystal, is actually an apolitical schmoe who was hapless enough to get mixed up in this business because of liberal incompetence.)
The second is that the film's attempt at "balance" is to reveal near the end that there this brutal hunt never actually existed until right-wing conspiracy theorists incorrectly accused several liberal elites of participating in one, thereby inspiring them to actually create it. It's a "twist" that still manages to make the liberals into monsters and the conservatives into, at worst, fear-mongering fools . . . and is also the only significant shade thrown at the pro-Trump side in this story.
The third, and by far most important, problem with Zobel's statement is that it reduces politics to a game, cheapening the real-world issues that impact people's lives and making it all seem like so much pointless bickering.
These are only a handful of examples from the film. The movie also references issues like cultural appropriation, anti-Semitism, the AIDS epidemic, abortion rights, atheism, and food safety concerns, and has characters use partisan nomenclature like "cuck," "snowflake" and "deplorable." (Even Fox News host Sean Hannity, the ultimate deplorable, gets a shout-out). The writers seemed to believe that merely acknowledging that something exists is tantamount to making a meaningful observation about it, a problem with much of modern American satire. Unfortunately, because most of these boxes from the Trump-era zeitgeist are checked for the sole purpose of giving the villains a motive for hunting the heroes, the message winds up being that liberal political concerns are nothing more than an excuse for putting one group of people in Team A and another in Team B.
Yet the difference between the pro-Trump and anti-Trump camps is not Coke versus Pepsi, Tweedledee versus Tweedledum. By telling a story based on that premise, and then have the liberals take things too far by actively hunting Trump supporters, the writers of "The Hunt" encourage right-wingers to believe something they yearn to convince the world is true — namely, that they are the victims in modern America.
It is why conservatives, when trying to vilify liberals, love to depict them as out-of-touch, wealthy elitists, even though right-wing ideology blames the poor for their own poverty and diminishes or outright denies how in modern America, the rich oppress the working class, white people oppress non-white people, cishet people oppress the LGBTQ community, men oppress women, and Christians oppress non-Christians. No one wants to believe that they are the bad guy in the movie of life, and what better way to convince them of this than to release a movie in which they are blameless victims literally hunted for their conservative convictions?
In retrospect, it is poetically fitting that the very assumptions encouraged by "The Hunt" nearly lead to the film's own undoing. When the movie was supposed to be released last year, it was swiftly attacked by Trump himself, who said it was intended "to inflame and cause chaos," claimed it was made by people who "like to call themselves 'Elite,' but they are not Elite," and said it proved that Hollywood is racist and "full of great Anger and Hate!" He also implied that the movie would provoke violence, and after the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, Universal Pictures decided to cancel its release at the time. While the movie executives would like us to think it was because of the fear of mass shootings or respect for the victims, the fact that the release was canceled so shortly after Trump denounced the film as dangerous makes it difficult to believe that his opposition wasn't a crucial factor.
To be clear: I do not support censorship. As reprehensible as "The Hunt" is, I do not question the filmmakers' right to create it. I also do not wish harm on anyone who disagrees with me. The point of this article is not to say that "The Hunt" shouldn't have been released, even if I can't help but smirk at the irony of Trump trying to suppress a movie without realizing that it's a love letter to his supporters. The point is that if you want to watch a thought-provoking, socially responsible horror movie, you can check out "The Invisible Man" or "Midsommar" or "Get Out."
"The Hunt" isn't satire; it is propaganda of the lowest sort. If you agree with this movie's message, there is something seriously wrong with your soul. Its only value is in helping dispel the myth of Hollywood's supposed liberal bias.
The Kushner family is trying to cash in on the pandemic that could kill millions of us.
Oscar Health, the health insurance company co-founded by Jared Kushner’s younger brother,announced Friday that it has launched a testing center locator for COVID-19 in the United States with more than 100 centers. The company is also offering a risk assessment survey and talking to a doctor online.
The coronavirus is predicted to kill anywhere from almost 500,000 Americans in the next year to more than 5 million. At least 62 people in the United States had died by Sunday, and 3,130 people in our country have tested positive for the virus.
Team Trump announced Saturday that Trump tested negative for the virus despite presiding over a coronavirus hot zone at Mar-a-Lago. Testing efforts have been marked by delays and dysfunction with just a few thousand people tested during the weeks health experts say the virus has been spreading across our country.
Trump reportedly tried to woo a German company working on a cure for the coronavirus to move to the U.S. and make a vaccine only for the United States.
Joshua Kushner, Jared Kushner’s younger brother, co-founded Oscar Health in 2012. His co-founders are Mario Schlosser, the company CEO, and Harvard Business School classmate Kevin Nazemi who left the company in 2015.
Jared Kushner has become increasingly involved in Team Trump’s response to the pandemic, helping write Trump’s half-baked Oval Office speech on the disease. The Kushner brothers co-founded Cadre, a real-estate investing start-up.
Oscar Health was criticized in 2018 for selling health insurance in Ohio through the Affordable Care Act with a deductible of $15,800. The company sold health insurance under the Affordable Care Act in 15 states for 2020.
Billionaire Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter who co-founded Pay Pal, invested millions in Oscar Health through his Founders Fund. Joshua Kushner’s father-in-law is New York doctor Kurt Kloss who turned to his Facebook group of emergency room doctors for advice to pass onto Team Trump about how best to handle the pandemic.
Oscar Health lost $110 million in 2019, almost double the $57 million the company lost in 2018.
On Saturday afternoon, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz took to Twitter to ask his followers to heed the advice of public health officials and politicians on the other side of the aisle:
“If you can stay home, stay home,” the Texas Republican wrote. “And wash your hands.”
Hours later, the Republican governor of Oklahoma tweeted from a packed restaurant in Oklahoma City showing that he is performatively not doing this. “Eating with my kids and all my fellow Oklahomans at the @CollectiveOKC. It’s packed tonight! #supportlocal #OklaProud”
On Sunday morning, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, told CBS’ “Face the Nation,” “Right now, personally, myself, I wouldn’t go to a restaurant.”
Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes, a California Republican, spoke on Fox News and said, “If you’re healthy, you and your family, it’s a great time to just go out, go to a local restaurant, likely you can get in easy. Let’s not hurt the working people in this country ... go to your local pub.”
Stay Home, Even if You Feel Fine
The discordant messages underscore the immense challenges conveying common messages during a public health crisis, one that has happened time and again as the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 has swept across the country.
“The most important thing is for people to change their daily routines and really reduce their social interactions,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a former federal and state health official who is now vice dean for public health practice and community engagement for the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.
“I don’t think it is the consistent message from all health and political officials. If people are going to change the way they live their lives, they need to hear about the need to do that from every credible source of information they have because if they get mixed messages it’s easy to lapse back to not changing.”
From the availability of testing to the need to avoid handshakes, from where patients should go if they develop symptoms to whether to touch your face, the messages — and the actions by the public officials and even sometimes the doctors delivering those messages — have been contradictory.
Go to the ER; Don’t Go to the ER
One day last week, for example, a New York City allergy practice sent patients an email telling them what to do if they suspect they have symptoms consistent with infection with COVID-19.
“As you may be aware, there is a shockingly low number of available tests, and all testing now is done through local emergency departments in the area,” the note read.
Hours later, the advice was retracted: “It has been brought to our attention that the recommendation to visit the ED if one suspects COVID19 is incorrect. One should call their primary care provider to be screened and whether a visit to a lab or emergency department is necessary. … We are sorry for the confusion.”
While the government’s inability to get coronavirus tests in the hands of doctors and local health departments has been roundly criticized for preventing leaders from understanding how the virus is spreading, the mixed messages being given by leaders and others throughout this outbreak threatens to have a continuing effect.
“In some places, at least, there’s an advice vacuum and that leaves a lot of people trying to figure out what’s available and what to do,” Sharfstein said.
Conflicting Information Causes Real Harm
Accurate information is the coin of the realm in public health emergencies such as this one. Setting expectations and sharing accurate information is vital, experts say.
At all levels of government and medicine, that hasn’t happened.
During a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this month, President Donald Trump said: “Anybody that wants a test can get a test. That’s what the bottom line is.” In fact, tests were not available. And public health officials told doctors and patients seeking them that they didn’t qualify.
The failure to provide clear answers has continued regarding the availability of ventilators in the event hospitals are overloaded. Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was asked on Fox News whether hospitals could run out in a crisis. Several times, she didn’t answer the question. “Well, that’s why we have an emergency preparedness system,” Verma responded. “We’re used to dealing with disasters.”
On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday morning, Fauci was more direct when asked whether the federal ventilator stockpile would be enough: “That may not be enough if we have a situation where we really have a lot of cases.”
The gap between government messages and reality applies to travel as well. Trump restricted travel from Europe and imposed additional health checks on Americans returning from European countries to protect Americans from the virus. “This president is going to continue to take every step necessary to protect the American people and put the health of the American people first,” Vice President Mike Pence said Saturday.
Yet, hours later, airports in Dallas, Chicago and Washington, D.C., were teeming with crowds waiting to get through the immigration checks. Some lamented that they were being exposed to others who may have the virus, the exact opposite of the stated reason for the additional checks.
Mark Morgan, acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, tweeted on Sunday morning that his agency is “aware of the reports of increased wait times at some airports across the nation. CBP along with medical personnel are working diligently to address the longer than usual delays. Nothing is more important than the safety, health and security of our citizens.”
Hours later, Morgan wrote another tweet, calling the waits at some airports “unacceptable.”
Do as I Say, Not as I Do
It goes beyond that. Public health officials have repeatedly called for members of the public to stop shaking hands, but the president has been resisting that advice, at least so far. “Shaking hands is not a great thing to be doing right now, I agree,” Trump said Saturday. “But people put their hand out. Sometimes I’ll put the hand out. You don’t think about it. People are thinking about it more and more. We have to think about it; it’s important.”
Public health officials also have told the public to avoid touching their faces, but sometimes those same officials have touched their faces. A public health official in California held a press conference to tell the public to avoid touching their faces, during which she licked a finger to turn a page in her remarks. (As this reporter has learned, it’s nearly impossible to stop touching your face.)
In a column in The Washington Post, two experts say communication is key, and sports and cultural icons should be brought in to reinforce important messages.
“A communications failure in the face of a pandemic amounts to not just a political problem; it is a public health problem,” wrote Lorien Abroms, a professor and associate dean at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, and Kenneth Baer, a communications consultant and former associate director of communications at the White House Office of Management and Budget.
“Communications can also be the solution: What is needed to help mitigate the severity of the coronavirus epidemic is a few, simple messages delivered by the right messengers. We need a whole-of-culture response — not just political leaders, but also the most influential athletes, actors, social media influencers, singers and personalities using every medium at our disposal to encourage Americans to change their behavior and inspire us to stick with it.”
The Tough Days Ahead
In the days ahead, consistent public health messages will be crucial, Sharfstein said, particularly if the virus continues spreading and places a burden on hospitals. Patients will need to know who to call if they get sick and when and where to seek medical care. Doctors will need to know where to send their patients.
In most cases, the answer is to avoid sending patients to the emergency room if they are showing mild or moderate symptoms of the virus. Those who become sicker or develop trouble breathing should follow up immediately with doctors or seek emergency care.
“A test itself is not treatment,” Sharfstein said. “A test illuminates what’s going on a little bit better. The response may just be to stay at home and monitor yourself. While it’s better to have more testing capability, we’re not powerless because the major response is just going to be to stay at home.”
You really did just wake up in these "great" United States to find that no matter where you live, your freedom of movement is now constricted. Not by the military, but by the fear of the invisible — a virus you never heard of before it shackled you and your family in a form of self-imposed lockdown.
The power dynamic here is merely a biological progression of what we feel when some malignant cyber-force zeros in on our laptop computer and takes control of it, holding us hostage.
If you are a regular consumer of the corporate news media this unprecedented national public health crisis is being covered through the partisan prism over the incompetence and malevolence of the current occupant of the Oval Office, Donald Trump.
What is being avoided meticulously is any broader and essential discussion about how this precarious planetary moment is a gift to us from late-stage vulture capitalism, which rents our national government as it subordinates the accumulation of wealth over every other human endeavor — including public health.
To start the coronavirus meltdown narrative with Trump's efforts to deliberately play down the risks we faced, which hobbled the U.S. response and will lead to potentially thousands of deaths, is to miss the reality that this systemic failure has been decades in the making.
Subjugation of labor
As the concentration of wealth accelerated and the income gap opened up to a canyon, the balance of political power tilted increasingly to the forces of capital, costing organized labor its leverage. Over that time the world was increasingly made safer for U.S. multinationals who successfully played labor markets off of each other as they captured the regulatory and taxation regimes of sovereign nations.
Everything was measured and governed by what encouraged economic growth and the amassing of wealth. Other vital spheres, from the environment to the public health, became secondary to the private pursuit of profit. Consider how hard it was to overcome the entrenched interests of the tobacco industry to provide the public health warnings on cigarettes.
After the Second World War in the early fifties, over a third of the U.S. workforce was represented by a labor union. Though unions have had their issues with corruption, on the whole they offer countervailing pressure to the potential predations of capitalism.
By the time President Reagan fired all of the Air Traffic Controllers (PATCO) in 1981, organized labor represented just a fifth of American workers. By 2019, it was just barely over 10 percent.
What has followed as a consequence is the massive growth of a contingent workforce hovering by the phone or checking their email to see if they have a "gig" or work for the day. This ability of capital to so greatly limit its social contract with workers creates a race to the bottom and leaves tens of millions without health care, unemployment or disability insurance.
It also puts employers and small businesses at a distinct competitive disadvantage if they choose to provide those basic benefits to their employees.
This is where there is an intersection with labor's marginal circumstance and our current national crisis —in which so many Americans will hesitate to get tested for coronavirus or stay home if they are sick. Millions upon millions of Americans cannot afford the expense or the loss of wages; they have absolutely no safety net in the event the test comes back positive and they are sidelined without work for 14 days, much less left with a hospital bill.
The essential role of labor unions as a countervailing pressure against the predations of unfettered capital is most clearly apparent in the airline industry, which is ground zero for many pandemics including this one.
Unions in the public interest
John Samuelsen is the president of the Transport Workers Union International (TWU) that represents 150,000 members in the airline, railroad, transit, university, utilities and service sector.
Last week, TWU had to back up the decision by a flight crew for a major national air carrier to refuse the orders they were given to go right back to work after they had successfully removed a passenger who had disclosed to crew after his flight landed that he had the coronavirus.
As reported by the Daily News, a Long Island man flew from New York to Florida while he had a test pending for the coronavirus. Upon landing in West Palm Beach, he got the call informing him of his status.
"Our crew facilitated the passenger's removal in a very sophisticated way that limited everyone's potential exposure out the back door of the plane with the help of medical professionals that escorted him off the flight," said Samuelsen. "But the crew was ordered back to work by the air carrier to crew up another flight and they rightfully refused because they knew they were now potentially carriers of the virus."
He continued. "They were still in shock and understandably concerned about their own health and when they were ordered to get back on another flight, they said no. The carrier had said the crew could work because they were asymptomatic and that's when the union stepped in."
Samuelsen recounted how, after the union's intervention, elected officials called the air carrier, as did the Daily News.
"We negotiated a package for the crew that guaranteed their economic security with paid sick leave. Ironically, in the process of doing what was right by our members we helped preserve the public health, which was the original goal of the flight crew. Without the union. we would have had another few planes loads of hundreds of unsuspecting members of the public exposed to the virus."
As Samuelsen sees it, proposals that were considered as radical ideas pre-coronavirus, like Senator Bernie Sander's universal health care plan or former presidential candidate Andrew Yang's proposal for a universal basic income, are no longer radical.
"Can you imagine how much less anxiety all American workers would feel right now if things like this were already in place," he said. "It would be a 365 day-a-year economic stimulus plan."
Public health versus private profit?
Such a realignment of the balance of power, where private capital's interest and the public interest could be potentially reconciled in the face of something like our current existential crisis, is already happening elsewhere on the planet.
Professor Richard Wolff is an economist who teaches at the New School. He says there is no better example of harmonizing these tensions then in China and South Korea, which have gotten their public and private sectors to collaborate in the face of the current pandemic.
"Look at the percentage of the population that has been tested in these two places and you can see the results of the close coordination between the government and the private sector which we don't have, and our testing numbers reflect that," he said.
Wolff says that the current crisis brings into sharp relief the fundamental divergence between American capitalism and the public health. "There was just no profit incentive for the big drug companies to produce a million of these kinds of tests," he added.
He continued: "Looking at the Center for Disease Control's own press releases we see as of Jan. 17 they publicly acknowledged they were following this virus in China . . . . what we have seen since is this ad hoc, last-minute, under-the-gun response with one eye looking out for the interests of the profit making medical industrial complex and the other eye looking out for the re-election of the President."
If there is a silver lining in the coronavirus moment, it is that it can serve as a teachable moment for our entire civilization. It can help us muster the will to make the lifestyle and economic changes required to face up to the challenge of global warming.
Bernie Sanders didn't drop out of the presidential race at his Burlington, Vermont, press conference last Wednesday, but he sure sounded like he sees the writing on the wall: He knows he will not be the Democratic nominee.
After a string of strong finishes against a crowded field in the first few primary states, Sanders' revolution seems to have succumbed to the strength of former Vice President Joe Biden's coalition. Biden currently holds a delegate lead of around 150 after he won 15 states on Super Tuesday and last Tuesday.
Sanders has pledged unequivocally to support his opponent if he loses the nomination. But he isn't quitting the race just yet. He could do something really dramatic at Sunday's debate — the first head-to-head faceoff of the cycle, which will be held in a Washington studio with no audience — and endorse Biden. There is little chance of that, however: The Sanders campaign announced this week that it's opening a rash of new field offices in Pennsylvania, which votes at the end of April. Instead, Sanders is likely to use Sunday's debate as an opportunity to force policy concessions from Biden.
At his speech on Wednesday, Sanders telegraphed as much when he laid out all of his criticisms of Biden ahead of the debate.
"Let me be very frank," Sanders said, "as to the questions I will be asking Joe."
Claiming that he was winning the "ideological debate," Sanders cited strong support for his platform that includes progressive policies like Medicare for All, increasing the minimum wage to $15, making public college and trade schools tuition-free, and eliminating big money from politics. Entrance polls reveal that Democratic voters in all three of the first presidential contests of the 2020 race show strong support for the single-payer insurance option. Exit poll result in numerous states won by Biden — including Mississippi, where Sanders did not even meet the statewide threshold for delegates — showed a clear majority of Democratic primary voters supporting a Medicare for All-style government health insurance plan in lieu of private insurance.
"We are winning the generational debate," Sanders said on Wednesday in reference to his nearly 80% support with voters under the age of 40.
"Today, I say to the Democratic establishment, in order to win in the future, you need to win the voters who represent the future of our country," he continued. "And you must speak to the issues of concern to them."
This will probably be the most-watched debate of the campaign, since most Americans will be holed up inside with no sports to watch, on a weekend of maximum "social distancing" thanks to the coronavirus outbreak. There has perhaps never been a better time for Sanders' message of strengthening the social safety net. He plans to use the opportunity as an opening for negotiations. He will frame his responses in such a way that Biden must address those key issues in his answers.
"Joe, what are you going to do?" Sanders asked.
Sanders is asking Biden to show at the debate on Sunday that he simply gets the message. At this point, absent a major plot twist that brings down the Biden campaign, it is clear that Sanders is staying in the race to give Biden an opportunity to court progressives, which is why he telegraphed all the questions he will ask of Biden at the debate. He wants Biden to give good answers while simultaneously shifting the Democratic platform left.
Sunday will be the first time the two frontrunners will stand toe-to-toe. If either one of them is to take on Trump in the fall, he must be vetted now. For all of the debates Democrats have held over the last year, they haven't really pressed Biden on a number key issues that Trump will most definitely not ignore. Even on Sunday, it is unlikely Sanders will even ask Biden about his son's dealings in Ukraine or China, issues where know the Trump campaign will drag the former veep through the mud. Biden, with his "no malarkey" campaign, better at least have clear answers on policy.
Vague platitudes about a return to normalcy may have been enough to lock Biden in place as the non-Trump candidate, but that won't be nearly enough to secure a win against the president's massive "Death Star" propaganda operation in November. In the debate on Sunday evening, voters will be able to judge who best can lead our country and who can take down Donald Trump.
"While our campaign has won the ideological debate, we are losing the debate over electability," Sanders admitted on Wednesday.
The voters who came out in 2016 will come out for any Democratic nominee in 2020 to vote against Trump. Exit polls make that clear. Democrats are united around a common cause. But whoever they nominate won't win the election without luring in some of the people who didn't show up in 2016. What this debate really benefits most of all is the democratic process.
I suppose we owe Jerry Falwell Jr. a debt of gratitude. I’m serious.
Falwell is the son of the late Jerry Falwell, the man most responsible for bringing fundamentalist Christianity out of the political wilderness during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Junior, along with Franklin Graham, himself a scion of a religious dynasty, is perhaps the president’s greatest champion among white evangelical Christians.
He appeared on “Fox & Friends” yesterday. Among other things, he accused Donald Trump’s enemies, including the press, of hyping COVID-19, the new strain of the coronavirus spreading around the world, panicking global markets and closing down entertainment and cultural events here and elsewhere. He, like Tom Cotton, the fascist senator from Arkansas, believes the disease outbreak can be blamed on totalitarian regimes in the east. For Cotton, that’s China. For Falwell, that’s North Korea. (While Falwell was on air, the president announced a state of national emergency related to the outbreak, undermining his and Cotton’s search for a scapegoat for his sake.)
Falwell’s demagoguery isn’t what we should be thankful for. What we should be thankful for is his confessing, without appearing to know it, that a pillar of “principled conservatism” in the United States is no pillar at all. Not in practice. Once you see that this pillar rests on a bed of sand, rather than constitutional bedrock, you start seeing other “conservative principles” do, too. “States' rights,” “gun rights,” “the right to life” and even “religious freedom” are nearly always about something other than what they seem to be. Falwell and his ideological confederates can’t be honest about it, though. If they were, they’d lose. Dishonesty, fraudulence and bad faith are central to their aims.
What would Jesus do? Not that.
Here’s some context, courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor (my italics):
“As in many states, residents in parts of rural, conservative Virginia say they seem to inhabit an increasingly different daily reality than that of urban and suburban districts. That feeling of separation was compounded by last November’s Democratic sweep of the state’s elected offices. Now residents in Frederick County are mulling a radical proposal: seceding from Virginia and joining neighboring West Virginia.”
Apparently Falwell is part of the effort. He’s the head of something called “Vaxit,” according to Fox & Friends. Whether that’s a real organization I have no idea, but that’s not what I’m most interested in. I’m most interested in expressing gratitude to the good reverend for admitting that “states' rights” have nothing to do with conservatism.
Think about it.
If the principle of “states' rights” meant what conservatives have said it meant to them, not one of them, not Jerry Falwell Jr. nor anyone calling him or herself a “principled conservative,” would dare suggest that a county secede from a state. If states are sovereign, as conservatives have alleged since Strom Thurmond ran as a Dixiecrat in 1948, calling for a county to secede from a state is traitorous. If “states' rights” are as sacred as conservatives have said they are, the idea of secession is an abomination.
In saying counties should leave the state as casually as ordering unsweet tea with his burger and fries, the Rev. Falwell told us without knowing he was telling us that conservatism in theory is authoritarianism in practice. It cannot and will not tolerate democratic change, despite change coming with the blessing of the majority. If the majority rules, Falwell and his confederates will abandon commitments to democracy.
Once you abandon democracy—once you open the door to treason—there’s no end in sight. Once it seceded, “the Confederacy began to deny states’ rights,” wrote James W. Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me. “Jefferson Davis denounced states’ rights as destructive to the Confederacy. The mountainous counties in western Virginia bolted to the Union. Confederate troops had to occupy east Tennessee to keep it from emulating West Virginia. Winn Parish, Louisiana, refused to secede from the Union. Winston County, Alabama, declared itself the Free State of Winston. Unionist farmers and woodsmen in Jones County, Mississippi, declared the Free State of Jones.”
By February 1864, Davis despaired: “Public meetings of treasonable character, in the name of state sovereignty, are being held.” Thus states’ rights as an ideology was contradictory and could not mobilize the white South for the long haul.
What mobilized the white South was the defense of slavery. Falwell and his new breed of confederate aren’t doing that, of course, but the spirit of treason, if not the act of treason, is the same. Conservatives tell us they prefer slow and gradual change, and stand united against radical attempts to bring it swiftly. But that’s not their true face. Conservatism in practice is a radical ideology reserving the right to betray its stated principles, and to betray community and brotherhood, if it doesn’t get what it wants.
Thanks to Jerry Falwell Jr., that’s now easy to see.
Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.
In 2001, in the wake of a series of anthrax attacks, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put together a 450-page manual detailing how public officials should communicate to the American people during a crisis like the COVID-19 outbreak. According a report about the manual in The Washington Post, “communication that is delivered early, accurately and credibly is the strongest medicine in the government’s arsenal,” and Donald Trump “is breaking every rule” in the book.
In another piece, the WaPo described Trump’s Wednesday evening address to the nation as “riddled with errors, nationalist and xenophobic in tone, limited in its empathy, and boastful of both his own decisions and the supremacy of the nation he leads.” The report noted that “his errors triggered a market meltdown, panicked travelers overseas and crystallized for his critics just how dangerously he has fumbled his management of the coronavirus.”
Trump’s relentless self-promotion is having a real-world impact. He continues to claim that he took early action to curb the outbreak, but he only moved quickly to shore up the stock market and his re-election prospects by downplaying the severity of the crisis. For weeks, he called it a hoax perpetrated by Democrats and the media, predicted it would soon pass and insisted that it was no more severe than seasonal influenza. Multiplepolls have since found that Republicans are less likely than Democrats to take steps to protect themselves from infection, such as washing their hands regularly, avoiding touching their faces and maintaining some distance from other people.
Now, unable to bullshit his way out of the situation, Trump is finally taking the pandemic seriously. But according to The New York Times, “studies of previous epidemics have shown that the longer officials waited to encourage people to distance and protect themselves, the less useful those measures were in saving lives and preventing infections.”
The irony is that if Trump had done the right thing—if he had listened to public health experts and prioritized the interests of the American public over his own narrow political concerns--he would have gotten what he has always craved more than anything else: praise for being a strong leader and respect from people outside of his cult.
The power of the presidency and the opportunities for Trump and his family to profit are great, but for a raging narcissist like the president*, those things pale in importance next to the public adulation that soothes his inner demons. Trump is a shallow thinker and mediocre businessman who became a millionaire at age 8 thanks to his father’s tax fraud scheme, and he has always chafed at the fact that real tycoons saw him as a hustler rather than a peer. He desperately wants to be the serious, successful leader that he sees in the mirror, and he had an opportunity to achieve it with a rare crisis that he didn’t create.
Unfortunately for all of us, he only proved that he isn’t bright enough or lacks the foresight to have seen how doing the right thing for us would have given him exactly what he desires most.
— (@)
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In related news, "the White House has ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified, an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion, according to four Trump administration officials." [Reuters]
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The Daily Beastreported this week that "the Pentagon is withholding more than $104 million from the military’s most important chemical and biological research facilities—including a lab that conducts cutting-edge work on infectious diseases—according to a senior Pentagon official."
And that’s only one aspect of the military’s financial shortfall in the unfolding crisis. A document briefed to the top brass of the Army on Thursday and obtained by The Daily Beast from a second Defense Department official reveals that the service’s response to the coronavirus outbreak is short of funding by almost $1 billion.
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According to Gizmodo, the US Navy is investigating a sailor named David Cole Tarkington, who is allegedly "a prolific Atomwaffen recruiter" who "also attempted to work with a representative of a group the UK government later classified as a terrorist organization."
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"The Air Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute (AHRI), a trade group that lobbies on behalf of heating and cooling product manufacturers, paid President Trump’s Trump National Doral resort near Miami $700,650 for its Annual Meeting event in 2017," according to the watchdog group CREW.
The giant payment coincides with ramped up lobbying spending by the AHRI in Washington, DC including lobbying the White House around the time of the event. The timing of the event is conspicuous because less than two weeks after the November meeting, the Trump administration announced its support for a policy the AHRI had lobbied in favor of.
While the Trump administration has been generally hostile to environmental regulations, going as far as pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, his administration has shown one environmental regulation support. The AHRI’s lobbying disclosure report covering the fourth quarter of 2017 includes lobbying “President of the U.S.” on environmental issues. One of two policies that was lobbied on in that issue area was, “Supporting the U.S. ratification of the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol,” an Obama-era policy that sets a timeline for phasing out the use of a greenhouse gas commonly used in refrigeration. The AHRI has argued that the policy would create manufacturing jobs and lead to more U.S. exports, and they’ve lobbied in favor of it during each quarter of the last three years.
On November 23, 2017, a State Department official announced—in the “most explicit and public” terms to date—that the Trump administration would support the policy. The next day the AHRI tweeted its support for the announcement.
Maybe climate change activists should start holding conferences at Trump's properties.
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In other Trump-corruption news, Propublica reports that "The Trump Organization paid bribes, through middlemen, to New York City tax assessors to lower its property tax bills for several Manhattan buildings in the 1980s and 1990s, according to five former tax assessors and city employees as well as a former Trump Organization employee."
It's not even a bad thing--you have to talk to the enemy in order to negotiate a peace agreement. It's just the asymmetry that stands out.
*****
There was a time, not long ago, when Republicans took national security seriously even as they claimed that the rest of the government was a threat to liberty or whatever. That was then, and this is now...
And we leave you with one bit of positive news from the courts. According to NPR, "a federal judge has issued an injunction blocking the Trump administration from adopting a rule change that would force nearly 700,000 Americans off food stamps, officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The rule change was set to take effect April 1.
Thousands of people are going to die, he knows he will be blamed and he can already see his campaign circling the toilet. Those realizations were all over Donald Trump's face on Wednesday night as he addressed the nation from the Oval Office. His speech was monotonal, his face so frozen with failure and fear that he looked like the product of taxidermy. He knows he is staring into the maw of a beast he can't control. It's going to be impossible to tweet away all the deaths that are coming, and he is terrified.
The question that sprang to mind as I watched him epically fuck up the most important moment of his presidency was this: What's going to happen when the numbers of coronavirus deaths begin to climb, and his numbers begin to tank? They will. He's not going to be able to stop the pandemic from killing thousands of Americans, and this lawless maniac is capable of anything. With the NBA and Major League Baseball suspending their seasons, with "March Madness" canceled, with concerts and festivals and parades canceled, Broadway theaters closed, schools shuttered from coast to coast, and the fact that we have no idea how long the coronavirus epidemic will last, Donald Trump is fully capable of making plans to cancel the election in November to save himself.
Trump tried to keep the whole thing secret at first, ordering the Department of Health and Human Services to hold its meetings about the coronavirus in secret — in a goddamned SCIF, for crying out loud! Because those initial meetings were top secret, important experts on epidemiology who lacked security clearances were banned from attending. Testing for the virus was held up by the CDC, which repeatedly refused to release hospitals and independent research facilities from regulations that prevented them from developing and fielding their own test kits. The idea throughout the initial weeks of the virus was to follow Trump's lead, keep the numbers of coronavirus cases as low as possible, and hope for the best.
Trump appointed himself as the man in charge of the message and started lying.
On Jan. 22, he said: "We have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China. It's going to be just fine!"
On Feb. 2, he doubled down and started laying blame: "We pretty much shut it down coming in from China."
On Feb. 10, he puked one of his "a lot of people" lies out of his cakehole: "A lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in."
Later that day, he marched out his acting budget director, Russell Vought, to reassure the nation with this jewel: "Coronavirus is not something that is going to have ripple effects."
On Feb. 24, he tweeted: "The coronavirus is very much under control in the USA … Stock Market is looking very good to me." (The Dow Jones was at 27,900 that day. On Thursday, it closed at 21,200.)
On Feb. 26, Trump said: "[The number of people infected is] going very substantially down, not up." "The 15 [cases] within a couple of days, is going to be down to zero." (On Friday, the number of coronavirus cases in the U.S. passed 1,800. The total number of cases probably exceeds 10,000, according to the Los Angeles Times, and could be much higher than that.)
On Feb. 27, he said: "It's going to disappear one day. It's like a miracle."
On March 6, during his visit to the Centers for Disease Control, Trump bragged: "I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. . . . Every one of these doctors said, 'How do you know so much about this?' Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president." Later that day, he marched out his chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, to say: "We stopped it, it was a very early shutdown. I would still argue to you that this thing is contained." Then he reassured the market: "Investors should think about buying these dips." (The market closed more than 2,300 points lower than the previous time Kudlow had advised "buying these dips.")
On March 10, the day before Trump's disastrous address from the Oval Office, Trump said: "It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away."
By Thursday, as the number of coronavirus cases passed 1,000, the market plunged 2,352 points, the largest drop since "Black Monday" in 1987, into"bear market" territory. Wall Street has spent three years holding its collective breath, praying that nothing would happen to cause the exact "correction" we're seeing now. The entire time they inflated the market and lined their own pockets, they knew Trump was a criminal and an ignoramus. He's from New York. They have watched him blow through billions in bad investments and suffer multiple bankruptcies. They got what they wanted from him in the big tax cut that went to players in the financial and real estate markets, leaving pretty much everyone else behind.
Now the proverbial chickens have come home to the proverbial roost. A pandemic Katrina is in the works. Millions of Americans will be infected. Perhaps hundreds of thousands may die. Congress is about to lash together a stimulus that will make what they did after the 2008 recession crash look like a payday loan. We don't have a clue how low the market will go, how many Americans will lose their jobs or how large the ripple effect of the pandemic will be in sectors like housing, manufacturing, even farming and the food supply. We are on the verge of a recession and could be looking into the black hole of a depression — and the man at the helm of the economic ship is drunk on the four years of lies and thievery that got him into the White House and has kept him there.
On Friday, Trump held a press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House that was a coronavirus petri dish: A large gathering of people sitting and standing close to one another. Trump shook hands with random corporate executives and administration officials as everyone used the same microphone, adjusting it with their hands, speaking directly into it and then passing it to the next fool. Reporters passed around a second microphone from hand to hand, using it to ask questions. If one person at that press conference, they were all exposed. That's Trump, leading by example.We don't have a president. We don't even have a cheerleader-in-chief. What we've got is a deranged fool who has spent his entire life doing whatever he felt like doing and has never faced a single consequence for his actions.
Now he's in charge of a government for which he has nothing but contempt and which he doesn't understand even at a kindergarten level. He's appointed industry lobbyists who behave like uneducated teenagers to run its various departments, and he has done whatever he could do to damage the ability of government to act in any meaningful way. The biggest chicken of all that's now roosting atop the White House, and atop the entire Republican Party for that matter, is the Reagan shibboleth that "government isn't the solution, it's the problem." We're about to learn what the coronavirus thinks of that little jewel of wisdom.
Trump is sitting there in the White House and, as dense as he is, even he can see that every day that passes, indeed every hour that ticks by, is another marker in his long downhill slide. His poll numbers are destined for the tank. He's going to look into the unblinking eye of the camera day after day during this crisis, and it will be right there on his face that he is clueless and afraid. His ability to "drive the narrative" is over. "Fake news" caught up with him. There is nothing he can do with his tweets and lies to stop what's about to happen to him, and to us.
The tragedy is that it didn't have to be this way. Republicans in the Senate had a chance to rid us of Trump, but they were too afraid of him to act. Now we're stuck with this monster. Their craven cowardice and disregard of the truth is going to cost us dearly. Companies will go bankrupt. People will lose their life savings, their houses and, sadly, their lives because this man is in the White House.
His re-election campaign is in the emergency room waiting to see a doctor, but they're all busy treating the people who are sick or dying from his criminal negligence, cruelty, ignorance and shame. It's only March, and Trump already needs a respirator. He's finished. He's a dead man stumbling toward a certain political grave — and the brutal judgment of history that he is the worst president this nation has ever had.
There will be deaths and those deaths will have been avoidable.
President Donald Trump's Friday afternoon press conference announcing a national emergency over the coronavirus pandemic was an astonishing self-congratulatory exercise in awful oratory, but it was also a grotesque snapshot into the decrepit world of Donald Trump.
For a moment just ignore all of Trump's figurative elbow-rubbing and back-slapping, literal hand-shaking, infomercialization, Disneyization, and commercialization of a global pandemic in which now Americans are no longer citizens but "consumers."
— (@)
Ignore the false claims and all-too-real coverups Trump painted. Ignore Trump's total lack of interest in the virus and his total interest in creating income streams for his corporate sponsors, like Google and CVS.
Focus for a moment on this extremely important fact: President Donald Trump shut down the White House Pandemic Office in 2018, and less than two years later America and the world are struggling through a global health emergency that Trump's own administration says could kill 5.1 million people in this country alone.
Friday afternoon PBS NewsHour White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor asked President Trump about shutting down that office.
His response was not just offensive and unpresidential, it was filled with lies.
"You said you don’t take responsibility [for slow response to coronavirus] but you did disband the White House Pandemic Office," Alcindor asked President Trump. "So, what responsibility do you take to that? And the officials that worked in that office said that you -- that the White House lost valuable time because that office was disbanded? What do you make of that?"
“Well, I just think it's a nasty question," Trump responded, weaponizing a word he regularly uses when speaking about women. "What we've done is -- and Tony had said numerous times that we saved thousands of lives because of the quick closing. And when you say me, I didn't do it. We have a group of people."
"It's your administration," Alcindor reminded the president.
"I could ask, perhaps -- my administration, but I could perhaps ask Tony about that, because I don't know anything about it," Trump claimed. "I mean, you say we did that. I don't know anything about it."
— (@)
Trump is lying, and here's how we know.
First of all, as U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) said on Twitter Friday afternoon, when Trump closed the Pandemics Office Brown sent him this letter "demanding answers."
And finally, this video of Trump from just a few weeks ago admitting he closed the office:
— (@)
"I didn't do it." "I don't know anything about it."
Those are lies, and they're lies to hide the fact that President Donald Trump is responsible for the United States' horrific handling of the coronavirus pandemic. There will be deaths and those deaths will have been avoidable had he pushed for the testing he repeatedly, even now, tries to suppress, and had he not shuttered the Pandemics Office.
Leading progressive advocacy group Public Citizen on Friday demanded that President Donald Trump resign immediately, declaring that his “intolerable failures of leadership” in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic have “endangered the lives of all Americans.”
In a statement, Public Citizen president Robert Weissman pointed to Trump’s repeated lies about the outbreak and refusal to “make science-based recommendations (e.g., older people should avoid cruise ships and plane travel)” as reasons for the president to step down.
Weissman also slammed Trump’s hesitancy to declare a public health emergency over COVID-19 “out of fear about the impact on the stock market.”
“President Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to the nation’s public health, and he should resign immediately,” Weissman said. “In a time when protecting the nation’s public health demands clear, truthful, and compassionate leadership, Trump has offered exactly the opposite.”
Trump has repeatedly downplayed the severity of the pandemic and attempted to shift blame to his predecessor for the White House’s botched response. The president has also repeatedly relayed false information to the public about his administration’s policy decisions, sparking mass confusion and fears of a global market crash.
“We’re in great shape,” Trump told reporters Thursday as the number of coronavirus cases in the U.S. surpassed 1,600 and as frontline workers continued to lament the lack of available testing equipment.
Politico reporter Dan Diamond toldNPR Thursday that, based on his understanding of the president’s thinking, Trump “did not push to do aggressive additional testing in recent weeks… partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak, and the president had made clear—the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential reelection this fall.”
In his statement Friday, Weissman said Trump has “presided over an administration that has inexplicably failed to deliver vitally needed coronavirus tests to healthcare providers around the country and then repeatedly lied to or misled the American public about remedying the problem.”
“He has dissembled about the seriousness of the coronavirus epidemic, either because he refuses to accept the truth or fears the impact on his political fortunes, or both,” Weissman added. “Trump should step down immediately.”
Read the statement in full below:
President Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to the nation’s public health, and he should resign immediately.
In a time when protecting the nation’s public health demands clear, truthful, and compassionate leadership, Trump has offered exactly the opposite.
He has dissembled about the seriousness of the coronavirus epidemic, either because he refuses to accept the truth or fears the impact on his political fortunes, or both.
He has refused to make science-based recommendations (e.g., older people should avoid cruise ships and plane travel) or to declare a public health emergency out of fear about the impact on the stock market.
He has misstated his administration’s own policies.
He has presided over an administration that has inexplicably failed to deliver vitally needed coronavirus tests to healthcare providers around the country and then repeatedly lied to or misled the American public about remedying the problem. Instead of taking responsibility for the problem and fixing it, Trump has bizarrely blamed it on his predecessor, Barack Obama.
He has attacked his political rivals rather than seek to bring the country together.
These failings have nothing to do with political ideology or legitimate areas of policy disagreement. They are intolerable failures of leadership in a time of national crisis that have endangered the lives of all Americans. Trump should step down immediately.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell smelled an evil liberal conspiracy on Thursday, one designed to steal away his decades of tireless work to kneecap the federal government. The Democratic-majority House had passed a large emergency bill, designed to combat the coronavirus pandemic, and McConnell was absolutely certain Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were trying to pull one over on him.
"Unfortunately, it appears at this hour that the speaker and House Democrats instead chose to produce an ideological wish list that was not tailored closely to the circumstances," McConnell said. He accused Democrats of exploiting this situation, saying the bill addresses "various areas of policy that are barely related, if at all, to the issue before us."
There's a lot at stake here, but apparently the big sticking point for McConnell was a provision requiring employers to offer paid sick leave to employees, which McConnell claims would "put thousands of small businesses at risk."
In reality, of course, this is just common sense. As the New York Times editorial board noted, companies that don't offer paid sick leave "are endangering their workers and customers." A lot of workers with public-facing jobs — such as food service workers and retail employees — come into close contact with dozens or hundreds of people a day. But they are the people least likely to be allowed to stay home without losing their jobs, or at least losing a paycheck.
McConnell is so poisoned by his right-wing ideology that he can't see this, or chooses not to. Instead, he's standing firm on the long-standing Republican tendency to view employers as feudal lords who should be allowed to treat employees however they wish — even, apparently, if that means allowing a deadly disease to rip through the population, potentially killing hundreds of thousands of people if it is not checked.
So far, most of the panic over the coronavirus outbreak has been driven by the undeniable incompetence of Donald Trump. At every turn, Trump has made this situation worse — even going so far as to try to discourage testing to bamboozle the public and, I suspect, tanking the markets by screwing up an Oval Office address because he's too vain to wear glasses so he can see well enough to read a teleprompter.
That's all true. But it's also important to understand that the larger Republican Party, even without Trump, is also to blame for what looks to be a serious public health crisis. Right-wing ideology, often marketed as "rugged individualism" but perhaps better understood as an aversion to the very concept of a common good, is one major reason why the U.S. government, hamstrung for decades by Republican power, isn't better equipped to handle a crisis.
This isn't just a Trump problem. This is a widespread Republican problem. For decades, GOP strategy has been consistent: Whenever they get power, they slash regulations and gut spending, with the goal of making government less effective. This is a deliberate strategy to make the public broadly distrustful of government, and therefore increasingly open to shifting more and more power to the wealthy individuals who control the private sector.
This ideological commitment to an every-man-for-himself ideology, which is terrible in any circumstances, is exposed as particularly dreadful in the face of a pandemic. Disease is a reminder that humans are a herd species, wholly dependent on each other for survival, and that government must be a way to formally organize that joint survival pattern. It's not some villain in a racism-inflected right-wing morality fable about the importance of "personal responsibility."
Simply put, we need our government to be able to protect us from disease. Republicans have spent years tearing it down, and even in a crisis are incapable of accepting that "small government" is not always a good thing.
As Max Moran at Talking Points Memo argued, the fact that Vice President Mike Pence — deemed a "normal" Republican — is in charge of the coronavirus comforts some people, because they believe he is more adult and responsible than Trump. Pence's track record suggests otherwise. As governor of Indiana, he oversaw an HIV outbreak that led to 10% of the population people in a single county becoming infected because Pence thought preaching the value of personal responsibility was better than following the recommendations of public health experts.
"[A] Pence-led response is dangerous, not in spite of, but precisely because he is a typical Republican," Moran writes, because normal Republicans "apply their competence and considerable resources" to the task of "protection for the powerful, callousness for the afflicted, and a special disdain for the 'other.'"
The right-wing idiocy that is going to get people killed is all over the Republican response to this situation. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy joined McConnell in denouncing the Democratic bill, even though everything in it — including expanding food-stamp spending — will either help slow the spread of the disease or stimulate the American economy to offset the inevitable slowdown caused by this epidemic.
The right-wing ideology poisoning is so bad that the coronavirus bill was held up in part because Republicans wanted to inject some anti-abortion language into it. There is absolutely no reason to believe that helping people protect themselves against a viral epidemic will lead to more abortions, but that's the modern GOP for you: They're always worried that somehow or other the Democrats have a sneaky agenda to "let" women have sex. (Which women will undoubtedly do, whether the Democrats authorize it or not.)
Even the so-called Republican "moderates" are to blame for this situation. For instance, Politico reporter Michael Grunwald uncovered this little tidbit about Sen. Susan Collins of Maine from his book about the Obama era.
Zooming out, it's easy to see how decades of damage to our government are likely to make this epidemic worse. Republicans have been stingy about health care spending and have blocked Democratic efforts to increase access, especially when it comes to the Medicaid expansion under the Obama administration. The result is that we have fewer doctors and hospitals ready to handle what we know is coming, and we will probably have a lot of infected people who won't get tested, either because they can't afford it or don't even know where to go for testing and treatment.
By all means, blame Trump for the current crisis. His incompetence is especially central to the panicked reaction of the financial markets. Even a slightly steadier president, whatever his or her party or ideology, would bolster investor confidence a whole lot more.
But this isn't just about Trump. Republicans have a profound hostility to good government, and whatever slapdash response they may grudgingly accept in an effort to save their skins at the ballot box this November will be hamstrung by the fact that they refused, for decades, to invest in the infrastructure necessary to weather the big shock that is hitting us right now. Viruses are the ultimate reminder that humans are interconnected and need each other, and that the ideal of "rugged individualism" is childish and often racist nonsense.
