When President Donald Trump suggested using UV light and disinfectant injections to treat coronavirus, Dr. Deborah Birx could only look on in stunned horror.
Commenters on social media noticed Birx's nonverbal reaction to the president — and swiftly weighed in.
During the months when Donald Trump thought he could somehow defeat the novel coronavirus by lying, minimizing it and calling concerns about the coming pandemic a "hoax," most Fox News hosts were right there with him. The one major exception, however, was popular prime time host Tucker Carlson. While Sean Hannity kept calling the coronavirus crisis a "hoax" and Laura Ingraham described people concerned about it as "panic pushers," Carlson actually criticized Trump and his Fox colleagues for "minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem," arguing that the virus was "a major event" that "will affect your life." The fact Trump made a reluctant pivot and began to admit that the coronavirus was a real threat — even though he's still trying to cover up the spread of the disease — is likely due to Carlson's pressure.
This article was originally published at Salon
In fact, the difference between Carlson's approach and that of his fellow Fox News hosts, especially Hannity, was so pronounced that it likely altered the course of the disease. A new study shows that communities that favored Hannity's show over Carlson's show had more cases of COVID-19 and more deaths. The reason is simple: Because Hannity downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus, his viewers were less likely to follow stay-at-home recommendations and therefore more likely spread the disease.
Don't get too soft on Tucker, however. He wasn't motivated by a real concern about the safety of his audience, much less about Americans at large. He simply took a more opportunistic attitude, viewing the inevitable panic and instability that would result from the pandemic as a chance to push his white nationalist views by blaming immigrants. He encouraged people to embrace racist frames that implied people of color were dirtier than white people, and encouraged Trump to use the pandemic as an excuse to shut down immigration. Trump has taken that advice, although his ban — which only affects people seeking green cards, not those seeking temporary work visas — has already been criticized by Carlson, who thinks it doesn't go far enough.
But now even Carlson's racism-inflected willingness to take the coronavirus seriously has abruptly ended. Starting at the beginning of April, even after his Fox News colleagues had begun to take the virus more seriously, Carlson switched gears and moved toward a denialist viewpoint. He started attacking public health officials for the stay-at-home orders and saying the economic results of the lockdown were worse than the disease.
(This argument, it should be noted, is entirely false. The notion that the economy would be doing fine with a highly contagious and often deadly disease ripping through the population is asinine. Evidence shows that the economy will not rebound, even if politicians remove the lockdown orders. And, as I've repeatedly argued, workers who stay home because they're sick aren't any more productive than workers who stay home because they're under lockdown.)
As happened with his emerging white nationalism, Carlson's denialist stance towards the coronavirus has only grown more extreme in the past few weeks. Last week, he praised the astroturfed protesters who swarmed state capitals, armed with rifles and Confederate flags, to portray the lockdowns as an elite conspiracy to destroy Trump.
On Wednesday night, Carlson stopped playing footsie with the conspiracy theorists and went full science denial.
"Mass quarantines, they tell us again and again, are the only way to save lives, but that's a lie," he said, bizarrely suggesting that quarantines have "never been done" and saying that we "have spent trillions of dollars and crushed millions of people, purely on the guess that a nationwide lockdown would save us from the coronavirus."
Carlson is lying, which should be obvious without even doing a moment's worth of historical research. If quarantines are a brand new thing that no one has ever considered before, why do we have a word for the practice? How is it that the word for this novel, unheard-of practice is so common that everyone knows what it means? How many other words does the English language have for things that don't exist and no one has ever heard of?
Humans figured out quarantines worked before they even knew why they worked. The CDC website I found after a Google search for "history of quarantine" explains that the "practice of quarantine, as we know it, began during the 14th century in an effort to protect coastal cities from plague epidemics," by holding ships at anchor for 40 days before docking. The website for PBS' "Nova" dates the practice back to 549 A.D. Boston first instituted maritime quarantines in 1647. Federal management of quarantine orders dates back to the 19th century.
Famous works of literature — including the Bible, with its references to leper colonies — have references to the practice. "The Decameron" by Giovanni Boccaccio, one of the most famous literary works of the Renaissance, is about people telling stories to pass the time as they shelter in place to avoid the bubonic plague. "The Plague" by Albert Camus tells the story of a plague and quarantine measures in a 1940s setting. Why do Romeo and Juliet die in the famous Shakespearean play? Because a messenger with a letter outlining the plan for their survival is waylaid by a quarantine. (Those of us still awaiting Amazon packages can relate.)
Tucker claims he's the protector of the great traditions of "Western civilization," mind you, but when it comes to actual history, he's decided to play ignoramus.
Of course, it's hardly news that Carlson thinks his audience consists of illiterate morons who don't know any history prior to 1982, but even for him this is a stretch. People know how disease spreads and why reducing exposure works. Polling shows that not only are Americans broadly supportive of the shelter-in-place orders, but that even a majority of Republicans aren't keen on ignoring well-established germ theory just because Fox News tells them to.
Still, Carlson is doing this for a reason: He needs to give his audience some excuse to claim that none of this is Trump's fault. (Narrator: It is Trump's fault.) He's offering them a conspiracy theory that these lockdowns aren't an authentic attempt to slow the spread of a deadly disease, but an invented crisis aimed at bringing down Trump. It's true that Carlson hasn't come out and said that, but it's the only real conclusion one can draw from his accusation that thousands of public health experts, bureaucrats and elected officials are working together (and none are blowing the whistle!) to crash the economy in order to grab "godlike power" for themselves.
There is no small amount of projection in his rant, in which he complains that "mediocre people" are trying to control "when people can get married, which medical procedures you are allowed to have." The people who are actually interested in doing that are, of course, Republicans who would like to ban same-sex marriage and abortion. But of course, accusing your opponents of doing what you are actually doing is exactly what right-wing conspiracy theorists do.
Carlson's full-blown Alex Jones-style conspiracy theories aren't just a threat to our democracy. They're a threat to the health of his viewers. As the study mentioned earlier in this piece has shown, many Fox News viewers are willing to break the stay-at-home orders to demonstrate their loyalty to Trump and faith in Fox News. Some have already died because of this. Tucker Carlson clearly doesn't care how many of his own viewers get sick and die. He has a larger agenda: Create some explanation, no matter how preposterous, that deflects the blame for this national catastrophe away from Donald Trump.
I admit it. I write on theme of betrayal so often I risk diluting the impact of the word with sheer repetition. I can’t help it, though. I see the national Republicans saying they govern in the interest of all Americans, then behaving as if only some citizens count as legitimate Americans. Trust is key to a democracy. We must trust our leaders to act for the sake of the common good, especially in times of crisis. When a partner suddenly demands freedom from responsibility, what word describes that other than betrayal?
This article was originally published at The Editorial Board
Nearly 48,000 Americans have died in the last five weeks from COVID-19, the disease caused by a new strain of the coronavirus. The death toll would almost certainly be higher had not good-faith governors (including Republicans) taken aggressive measures to force people to isolate or distance themselves from each other in order to retard the disease’s spread. A major consequence, of course, has been an economy in near collapse. Today, the government reported another 4.4 million unemployment insurance claims, bringing the total number of official jobless to about 26 million.
Even Donald Trump’s most vocal critics don’t hold him entirely responsible for the damage done, but no reasonable person can say he did close to enough when it most mattered, or has done enough since. The president’s administration “delayed or bungled basic but crucial steps to contain the spread of infections and prepare the country for a pandemic,” according to a review of government documents by the LA Times. The investigation is just one of a host of reports showing the president privileging his television image over the health and well-being of the populace.
The president might be forgiven (politicians are self-interested, after all) if his Republicans had spared a thought for the 56 million northeasterners facing the worst. But they didn’t. Instead, in each of three relief bills passed so far (a fourth is pending in the House), the Republicans demonstrated concern for the health and well-being of corporations struggling with a near-total absence of consumer demand. To be sure, normal people are getting one-time checks, but big businesses are getting massive, cheap and forgivable loans. Meanwhile, the Fed is printing trillions to take over the bond market and provide virtually unlimited lending to Wall Street banking firms.
Even that, however, wouldn’t be so bad if major cities and blue states got a cut of the action. Fighting mass disease and death has strained their resources to the breaking point. Even the richest municipalities foresee the possibility of insolvency in the near term. If the airline, hospitality, banking and oil industries can get bailouts, surely so can cities and states defending the country against the “invisible enemy” whose existence a Republican president refused to acknowledge for weeks and weeks.
Not so fast, said Mitch McConnell. The Senate majority leader said yesterday that his conference was in no mood for more relief. The national debt is becoming a serious issue, he said. We can’t mortgage our children’s future on a “blue-state bailout.” “We’re not going to let them take advantage of this pandemic to solve a lot of problems that they created for themselves with bad decisions in the past,” he said. Instead, he said, he’d rather work to change current federal law so states can declare bankruptcy.
It’s hard to express the depths of betrayal here, but I’m going to try. First, future insolvencies are not a consequence of past decisions by the states, but instead recent inaction by a president whose gross negligence and incompetence forced cities and states to take matters into their own hands. Second, McConnell is suggesting the country does not owe these cities and states a debt of gratitude deserving of federal compensation even if the money ended up covering “bad decisions in the past.” Third, in not recognizing the debt owed, and instead offering the possibility of bankruptcy, he’s slapping the face of anyone who has sacrificed, which is to say everyone.
With respect to blue states, the betrayal goes even deeper. Blue states are richer, and they send more tax dollars to Washington than they get in return. That’s not so bad given that blue states tend to believe in the common good, plus they used to keep some of the money thanks to a tax code allowing filers to deduct state and local taxes from their federal tax returns. In 2017 Trump, McConnell and the Republicans capped SALT deductions, in effect raising taxes on rich states while cutting taxes for obscenely rich individuals. Blue states were already subsidizing red states. Now that went double.
Make it triple. McConnell is fine with extracting wealth from major cities and blue states, redistributing it to red states and GOP-friendly corporations, while at the same time expressing concern for the national debt just when 56 million Americans, who collectively send Democrats to Washington, are in full need of assistance. McConnell is happy, in other words, to let a pandemic weaken and impoverish his political rivals. That’s not what you expect from a leader governing in the interest of all Americans.
It is, however, what you’d expect from a traitor.
What do celebrities like Samuel L. Jackson, LaTanya Richardson, Suze Orman, Valerie Jarret and Iyanla Vanzant have in common? Well, they're stuck at home like the rest of us, and they've all been featured on April Ryan's new Instagram Live show, "Covid Conversations." Many know Ryan from her work as a CNN political analyst and her role as a White House correspondent for the American Urban Radio Networks. While she's stuck at home and unable to go to the White House, she started her own show Monday through Thursday at 7 p.m. ET on her Instagram. No lights and no stage — just Ryan at her desk with her phone.
This article was originally published at Salon
Ryan has covered presidents for more than 20 years and is the realest interviewer I've ever met. Other than celebrities, Ryan has also had a number of politicians on "Covid Conversations," including Rep. Karen Bass and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries. From finance and relationship advice to the time Kim Fields met Michael Jackson and Prince, Ryan's show offers rich, honest reflection that we need to make it through these dangerous times.
Ryan and I discussed her show, her assessment of President Trump and his response to the coronavirus pandemic, and how physical distancing has given her a new perspective on covering the news. Watch my "Salon Talks" with April Ryan here, or read our conversation below.
People who have homes and who have the luxury of staying home have been stressed out during quarantine. They can't handle it. But I feel like we're from Baltimore, so we're wired a little differently.
D. Watkins, you are right. We're wired differently. Bishop Walter Scott Thomas from Baltimore said to me, "Baltimoreans are not like any other resident of any other city because this is the only city where you have the word failure built into your existence." I said, "Wow, that's so true." To stop from failing, it's about surviving and trying to get out. My thing is, we have seen the bottom, we've seen rock bottom, and we know how to deal at rock bottom.
All of us are struggling. People who had the privilege before have lost paychecks or have had their paychecks cut, and what was privilege before coronavirus — the new BC — is now a different privilege. Those who are the hourly workers are yearning to go back to work, to pay their rent, to pay for food, to pay for doctors for their kids, versus people who are still getting a check and their companies are saying, "Oh, work from home right now." We're considered the ones who are privileged.
If you work at a market or if you deliver packages for Amazon, you are on the front lines right now. When I check in with my family and the people who I have to take care of and send money to, the stories are different than when I talked to some of my artist friends who are like, "Oh, I can't create in this space." I'm like, "You're not in jail, you're not homeless, you should be thankful."
This is the time, this is the creative space. This is the time. I'm using it. First of all, I thank God for everyone. I thank God for those on the front lines, the doctors, the nurses, ambulance drivers, those who take care of people. I thank God for those who are working at Amazon. I'm not taking my dog to the groomer, I'm not taking my dog to the vet, I'm not taking my children to the hairdresser, I'm buying all kinds of shampoos. I got the dog a nail grinder. I've been ordering. I'm trying not to go out. I've been ordering from Instacart. Thank God for them.
They have to work and I thank God for all of them. To be quite frank, we cannot be so high that we don't understand what's going on and understand the plight of everyone. I told my kids, I said, "Look, if mommy loses her paycheck, mommy's going to Amazon. If mommy loses her paycheck, she's going to be going to Instacart or something." And that's the reality of life. Things have changed. It's like that book, "Who Moved My Cheese?" You cannot stay and die, you have got to live and survive. This is a time to be creative and to really take the emotion out of it and look at what is. This is fighting time, survival. D, we've been through it. We live it in Baltimore.
As the great Toni Morrison says, "This is the time when artists go to work."
Right, exactly. So, what are my strengths? What are my strengths? What am I doing? Not only my strengths to do something else or to create, but also to preserve my mind. Because if you keep watching the news, if you're innocent and if you're watching the president vacillate or give misinformation and you're like, "What more?" You got to be able to learn how to pull away and find yourself.
I joke about this, running from 'rona, I'm finding myself, or running to myself, finding out who I am. You've got to laugh to keep from crying. I wake up in the morning in panic sometimes and I can't go there, and that's happened at least twice to me. I've had terrible dreams and I cannot go there. I am the head of my household with two daughters. And you know as a parent yourself, if you are out of line, everyone else is out of line.
Exactly.
You've got to keep the morale up and you've got to keep it going. So, what am I doing? I am working every day from home, because I'm one of those people, like millions of people globally, who have underlying issues. I'm not going to the White House right now questioning the president, but I am talking to the people who talk to the president, who are in his ear, my sources. He doesn't know who I'm talking to, but I'm talking to people and still getting the stories out in real time.
I'm talking to Susan Rice, former national security adviser, I'm talking to Jeh Johnson, former head of Homeland Security, who says, "We are in a national security crisis." This is not just national emergency, this is a national security crisis. I've talked to the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, who says that there is still a need for testing kits, masks and ventilators in Detroit, as the president is talking about opening up the nation.
Since you bring up Michigan, have you been seeing these crazy anti-social-distancing rallies in Michigan and other places? What's going on with that?
The president wants to open it up because it will look like a victory for him. We haven't hit the numbers that were anticipated and now we're opening it up and it looks like a victory. But you can't say it's a victory when people are still being infected and there's a chance of more people dying. And you see, when China reopened, more people were infected again, and some people were re-infected. So, this is something you've never seen before. People want to do this anti-distancing — and I don't call it social distancing, we're socially connected, but we're physically distant. We need to say "physical distancing," to be correct. But, at the end of the day, we have to stop. This is not about President Trump, this is not about Joe Biden, this is about people and their lives. This is not a political thing. The economics does play into it and I get it, but you cannot open up full societies, particularly societies that are being hit.
Michigan has been hit hard and Michigan is a very blue-collar state. You've got a lot of auto industry there, you've got so much there. And I get it, but we have to be very cautious in our steps forward, and the question is, is the psyche going to allow us to be like we used to be?
You've covered a couple of White Houses. Is this your fifth president? Fourth president?
Fourth president. I started with Bill Clinton. I was there for Monica Lewinsky. I'm older than I look, D. But here's the thing, this president — let's start by saying he wanted to drain the swamp and he wanted to bring new faces into Washington. That's red flag No. 1, scarlet red flag No. 1. You need people at a time such as this, when there's that hidden variable that can come and upset the apple cart, who know what to do. He destroyed his national intelligence security team. He was warned about this and he called it the Democratic hoax. Yes, he may have shut down travel from China, but he kept calling it a hoax. He didn't take it seriously enough and he kept saying it's nothing but the flu, and now 100 percent of the nation is shut down, stay-at-home orders because of this.
This president, he believes that he knows everything. At one point, he was almost to the point where he was an MD, and I'm like hmm. So the bottom line is this president wants the world to get back to normal — well, all of us do. He's listening to Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx about keeping it shut down, but the question is, did it have to be the way it is now? Listening to the former national security adviser and former UN ambassador, Susan Rice, she said this could have been prevented. It would not have been this bad if they would have dealt with it. Not only that, they shut down the offices that they set up for pandemics. They disregarded the advice of Susan Rice and others. Her counterpart, she says she met with him for 12 hours on various occasions, Michael Flynn, and Michael Flynn didn't say anything. They dismantled the office that would handle this, and they don't have a crisis management team right now.
How long do you think this is going to last?
Dr. Fauci and many of the infectious disease officers are saying that it's a work in progress with the antibodies. They thought the antibodies from those who had this were show up really well for the vaccination, but now they're saying it's a work in progress. It didn't pan out the way they thought. So, understand that they're looking for a vaccine and the vaccine will take at least a year to a year and a half, and then once you get the vaccine you have to mass market it. Once you mass market it, you still have to go through the process of immunizing not just the nation, but the world. This is going to be an ebb and flow for at least two years.
Do you think we're going to be home for two years?
I don't know what we're going to be, but this is going to be an ebb and flow for two years. And I don't believe the stuff about the summer, because I'm going to tell you about the summer. New Orleans is warm and they still have it. Louisiana was hit hard. California has it, and that's a warm state. So, I don't believe the warm weather thing.
One of the things that a lot of us have found joy in during the pandemic is your new Instagram Live show. You are having real, serious and moving conversations with everyone from Suze Orman to Kim Fields, Iyanla Vanzant and Samuel L. Jackson.
We've had a lot of great guests. And we're going to get someone who deals with skin and hair because I'm going to tell you something, as a black woman who's never done her hair, I'm going to have someone talk about natural hair and skin in the midst of this, because we're not able to go to the store like we used to. This show is my first attempt to heal because I didn't understand it. I knew if I was hurting, I knew other people were hurting. I wanted to give information, I wanted to uplift and inform. We are so bogged down with bad news.
It hurt me when I started seeing the reports that people were fighting in the house. Domestic violence has risen, child abuse is on the rise. It is bothering me to hear those things as my children and I — the first couple of days we were like, "Look, the best way for us to get along is come together and give each other space." We have been doing very well. I've discovered my children think that they are chefs, they are making anything. My daughter made some kind of lemon-zest mashed potatoes with garlic in it. I was like, "Oh, yes." Then she fried steak. She said, "Mommy, I need some white wine." I said, "I'm not giving you my white wine," and I was looking on Instacart to see if I had any white cooking wine, they didn't have it. I said, "Here, take this moscato." I don't drink anyway, so I said, "Here, take this moscato." It was the best steak I've ever had. It was restaurant style, it was better than Ruth's Chris. I didn't need to put any white sauce on it.
I love it.
We're finding ways to come together. I knew a lot of my friends were hurting and I said, if I'm hurting, if they're hurting, let me do something. That's when I got Iyanla on. Before that, Sabrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, asked me, "Could we do something together?" She wanted to do something with me, Iyanla and Bishop Vashti McKenzie, and I said, "Yeah, let's do it," and we did it and it was such an outpouring. I said, "Wait a minute, there's something here. People are hurt."
How do you select your guests?
It's people that cross my path that I like, or they like me. D, we're blessed to be in this business and we come across some fascinating individuals and fascinating stories. We talk real stuff because we are in such a hard time. It's not only hitting our health, our family, but it's hitting our pocketbook, and I want to inform. That's the nature of what I do and who I am. Mine is about information, giving you something that you can use, but if there's a laugh along the way to ease the pain, let's do that. I want to uplift, inform, and give you a how-to. I want you to be able to come through this, and it's my therapy. I'm human like everyone else. I have opened my eyes in panic at least two nights, and last night I had a terrible dream, a terrible dream. It is my therapy.
We're going to have a love counselor, once again because you think your home is your palace. But for some, it's become their prison because their safe space is not their home but their school or their workplace. Because at home, they could be dealing with an abusive spouse or someone who's drinking or it's just not safe. That really has bothered me, because my mother, growing up in Baltimore, no matter what happened, my home was my castle. I've tried to make that for my children as well, and it hurts me to hear that. We are hurting right now as people in the midst of this, and it hurts my heart to hear that people don't have the tools to get along.
I don't know how long we're going to be in this thing. I got to teach my children how to cook and I got to learn how to do their hair. It's tough not to be at the White House every day, because I have underlying issues. I'm still working, but it's tough because that is in my blood. I let that go about a week into it. I said, "OK, you got this." I'm watching the briefings, but it's tough.
We're happy you're healthy.
I had to run from death threats, and now I've got to run from 'rona. People are like, "Why aren't you in the briefing room?" I'm like, "Look, No. 1, I got underlying issues, and 'rona exacerbates those things, and will kill you." If I ran from death threats and had a bodyguard, do you think I'm going to sit there and let 'rona kill me? No, I'm a runner.
Is there going to be an April Ryan talk show after this? I think we need it. You're covering the survival skills and the coping mechanisms, and the fun stuff, and the steak recipes.
From your mouth to God's ear. I've always wanted a TV show and if that's for me, God bless. I thank God that I'm able to do my hair and do my own makeup. I sat there and watched in the makeup chair at CNN, watched all the great makeup artists. So, if they want to put a camera here, I'm ready to go, let's do it.
I'm a kid from Baltimore who just happened upon this. I feel like the black female Forrest Gump. I happened upon this and if people like it, I'm like, "Wow, OK." Next I'm having Jonathan McReynolds, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, the head of the Democratic Caucus, and also the back part of that half hour is the head of the Congressional Black Caucus, Congresswoman Karen Bass. Then, I'm going to have the hair doctor, Dr. Kendrick, and then Valerie Jarrett.
We've got some big names that we reached out to, we're going to see. We've got a lot of how-tos. This is a time of creativity we're trying to foster. We want to be there for you. So, I'm just honored that you would think of me and that you're watching.
Let me tell you something, you find out who you are in the midst of this trying time. My daughter, my youngest daughter, will pop the chain off every bike that's in this house. I wound up figuring out how to undo the chain and put it back on right. Normally I'm like, "Let's go to the bike shop," and I said, "I can do this," and so I'm figuring stuff out. I got a snake. If we have a clogged toilet I can do that too, because I'm not calling people in here. I think this is the time that we find out our strengths and our limitations.
Since I was a little kid, I ate from carry-outs, the corner store. Now I cook breakfast.
What do you cook for breakfast?
French toast. Sometimes I make egg sandwiches.
Wait a minute, you make your own French toast? You make homemade French toast?
I dip the bread in the egg and a little cinnamon, a little nutmeg, a little bit of vanilla.
Yes! Yes, you are. I'm proud of you.
These days are short, they're not long. I break away and do a little bit of writing, or we do our interviews. It's just blessed, I'm just taking it one day at a time.
My kids are doing online work, and I'm working during the day. I normally don't do this during the day because I'm still working during the day. The president's on at 5:30, and I watch that until it's time for me to do my IG Live. But I make sure the girls are doing their work and then we come together, we play around, I sit with them and fix lunch for them. Then we have dinner in the evenings or they'll make dinner themselves, and it's been such a blessed time of talking with them and being with them, and they're so funny. If you can find the little pieces of joy in this, look for them, because it's so easy to be negative. But find the little pieces of joy because you're going to fall back on them. This is a moment that you're going to say, "We got through that together." This is a time of creativity for everyone.
More than a month ago, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi successfully negotiated a bipartisan coronavirus response bill. It didn't include universal paid sick leave or direct cash assistance, but Democrats won expanded free COVID-19 testing and unemployment benefits. Pelosi was criticized for trumpeting a relatively meager relief bill as the coronavirus pandemic spread across the country and businesses began to shutter.
"Pelosi has Trump over a barrel," wrote Politico's Michael Grunwald, who extensively covered the economic stimulus negotiations in 2009, arguing that the Republican minorities in the House and Senate at that time did not shy away from exploiting that crisis to win policy concessions from President Obama.
More than a month ago, I argued that the criticism of Democrats was overblown: They hadn't really been outflanked on the left by some of the most conservative voices in Washington, suddenly refashioned as right-wing populists in the era of Trump. But I conceded this much: "Democrats on Capitol Hill, making a plausibly earnest effort to actually lead in a time of crisis, are losing the messaging battle."
Now, three congressional relief packages, 22 million lost jobs and nearly 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 later, Democrats have won a one-time, means-tested cash payment to most but not all U.S. citizens, strengthened nutritional assistance, and billions in funding for small business grants and loans, albeit in a limited initial offering that showed signs it would be overwhelmed even before it became publicly available.
So indeed the messaging battle is not going well. Apparently, when you've got them over a barrel — you take a break?
Some House Democrats are now heading back to Washington after returning to their home districts late last month, to shepherd through the passage of another aid package, this one a Senate-negotiated deal to shore up the funding for small businesses meant to keep up payrolls. To that end, this bill was unplanned but hardly unexpected.
Twelve days ago, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered only $250 billion in additional funding for the newly established Paycheck Protection Program, and nothing else. Democrats pushed back and eventually won more federal funding for disease testing and billions more for hospitals and personal protective equipment for medical workers. While the goal of stimulus funding is to keep all employees financially afloat as the economy rides out the coronavirus shelter-in-place orders, Democrats secured the second tranche of PPP funding exclusively for small businesses, after large companies and national chain restaurants gobbled up much of the first round.
Trump has already promised to sign the package into law once it is approved by the House, which is expected to do so on Thursday. Democrats won a national testing program, which, as Salon's Amanda Marcotte explains, was resisted by the Trump administration for the obvious reason that the president doesn't want an accurate tally, and would rather foist that responsibility on to governors.
So in a way, Pelosi exerted the Democrats' leverage, and it worked. This latest bill doesn't contain any obviously bad concessions. In an election year where Democrats had already planned to run on health care, it makes sense that Pelosi would prioritize a push for national testing. Of course, in a normal administration, even one dominated by "conservatives," both sides would want testing. So even a win hardly seems like a win.
Why do Democrats keep on losing the messaging wars? Because they refuse to do politics.
Sixty-six percent of voters — including 56% of Republicans — support providing two weeks of paid sick leave for all U.S. workers in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak. Still, with the Senate in recess, not one senator on the left — not even Bernie Sanders nor Elizabeth Warren — tried a filibuster to fight for increased paid sick leave. Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, on the other hand, a pair of consistent libertarians who oppose most new federal spending, made a show on the Senate floor of their supposedly principled opposition to the bill, and stuck to that even in the middle of this pandemic.
Democrats' negotiations, on the other hand, have left workers for companies with more than 500 employees, including the overworked essential employees at corporations like Amazon and Walmart, without paid sick leave. They have left undocumented immigrants and many U.S. citizens who are married to immigrants without access to stimulus funds, and millions of involuntary unemployed people without eviction protection. This bill, like all the rest before it, is so much smaller than it should be. For example, it includes no funding to save the U.S. Postal Service, which Trump has threatened to shut down, nothing to protect elections or voters and nearly no oversight of all this free money.
So while Democrats may have campaigned to take back the House in 2018 on the promise to serve as a check on Trump — only to slow-walk impeachment and pass a whole bunch of symbolic legislation to die on the Grim Reaper's desk, they continue to prefer chipping away at Republican obstruction rather than to face it head-on with policies that are supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans.
This is the problem with evaluating how Democrats wield power in Washington. The way they deploy their so-called leverage almost always means consciously deciding not to help people in the hope of short-term political gain. Furthermore, Republicans know that Democrats will always cave rather than be perceived as doing nothing — and Democrats often have little choice, because Republicans are more than happy to do nothing. Those who want to build will always be at a disadvantage, faced with those who seek to destroy.
Now Mitch McConnell has said he wants to hit the brakes on any future bills aimed at helping people on the front lines of this crisis. Republicans have said again and again that they oppose aid to state and local governments, trashing Democrats' demands for a phase-four stimulus package as a "blue-state bailout." But in the middle of a once-in-a-generation global pandemic, maybe Republicans are only pretending that they resolutely oppose aid for first responders. It's time for Democrats to call their bluff.
From the financial crisis to the debt ceiling, Republicans have long used emergencies like hostage situations to demand deeply unpopular policies. A diverse group of more than 20 activist groups on the left has now demanded that Democratic leadership step aside to make way for bold proposals from the ranks. Democrats should push progressive policies, they argue in a letter to the House Democratic Caucus: The bill from Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., to cancel rent and mortgage payments for the duration of the crisis; the bill from Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., to provide emergency health care coverage during the pandemic; and a temporary Universal Basic Income bill written by Jayapal and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., that would provide $2,000 to every person in the U.S., every month that the shutdown continues.
"If we pass a relief bill next year, we're gonna be paying for morgues, and if we pass a relief bill now, we will be paying for prevention. And that's the difference," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., recently told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.
Pelosi has again promised to play hardball on the next round of negotiations, even before voting on this round. Pointing to a Trump tweet in support of federal funding for states, Pelosi told the Washington Post that "McConnell will do whatever the president wants ... and the president needs this."
But here's the problem with always planning to get more in the next round: You have less leverage each time. Without a message strategy to harness public pressure behind a more progressive agenda, Republicans will continue to feel insulated from their decisions. It would be wise for Democrats to exploit the galling admissions from members of what Salon's Chauncey DeVega describes as the Republican "death cult," such as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's suggestion that America's elderly are expendable when it comes to the economy.
Eventually, Fox News viewers could grow resentful of such callousness. Consider this: Net approval for Trump's coronavirus response among people aged 65 and up has gone from +19 percentage points to -1, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of 11 battleground states. Older voters now disapprove of Trump's handling of the coronavirus response more than any age group other than 18-to-29-year-olds.
No matter how Democrats play their hand, Republicans are already blaming them for sky-high jobless numbers. McConnell will take his ball and go home, while most Americans get no additional support, for at least a couple of more months. Ours is a political system that needs compromise to function. But one political party views such compromise as tantamount to treason. We can debate Democrats' specific policy failures, which may be defensible. But their unwillingness to make Republicans own their choices in the middle of a pandemic — by publicly calling them out and playing politics during an election year — is a clear indication that our political system is not equipped for this moment.
Americans continue to publicly shun individuals violating social distancing requirements as the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rise in America.
Twitter uses took to the hashtag #SignsYoureACOVIDIOT to mock those unconcerned with coronavirus, which has claimed the lives of almost 50,000 Americans.
Here are some of the popular submissions:
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump left Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) out to dry, telling the nation at his latest coronavirus press conference that he disagrees "strongly" with Kemp's decision to reopen several high-risk industries — even though he had spent weeks urging GOP governors to do exactly that.
Kemp's political misfortune became a swift subject of mockery on social media.
At Wednesday's coronavirus task force briefing, President Donald Trump let the topic drift to his Fourth of July military parade last year — and compared the crowd size to that for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when he gave his "I Have a Dream" speech from the Lincoln Memorial.
The president's comparison drew swift outrage on social media.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell staked out risky ground on Wednesday in an interview with right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt with a callous dismissal of calls for Congress to support state and local governments amid the coronavirus pandemic and recession.
While many observers have argued the states will need federal support as their revenues collapse and their expenses spike, McConnell said he’s more interested in letting the governments go bankrupt.
“I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route,” the Republican Majority Leader said. “It’s saved some cities, and there’s no good reason for it not to be available. My guess is their first choice would be for the federal government to borrow money from future generations to send it down to them now so they don’t have to do that. That’s not something I’m going to be in favor of.”
These remarks quickly drew comparisons to President Gerald Ford’s refusal to bail out New York City in 1975, which led to the iconic New York Daily News headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has already warned that President Donald Trump risks sending the same message.
Currently, states are unable to declare bankruptcy. And unlike the federal government, they’re bound by tight budgetary constraints, so they can’t simply start borrowing money in a crisis. That’s why it’s necessary for the federal government to step in at this time to support them and fill their budgetary shortfalls until the economic crisis has passed.
But McConnell is dismissing this notion, claiming that — after finding hundreds of billions of dollars to spend on suffering businesses — the national debt is a “matter of genuine concern.” But with interest rates near zero and a crisis on the scale of the Great Depression looming, there’s no better time for the federal government to borrow money. And McConnell was much less concerned about the budget deficit just a short while ago when he pushed through a $1.5 trillion tax break for corporations and the wealthy and let federal spending expand.
To make his newfound fondness for austerity more palatable to GOP voters, he tried to cast deficit hawkishness as a way to stick it to the Democrats. In a release from his office, McConnell referred to the calls for supporting state and local governments as “Blue State Bailouts,” and he tried to blame overly generous public sectors for the shortfalls.
“I said yesterday we’re going to push the pause button here, because I think this whole business of additional assistance for state and local governments needs to be thoroughly evaluated,” McConnell said. “You raised yourself the important issue of what states have done, many of them have done to themselves with their pension programs. There’s not going to be any desire on the Republican side to bail out state pensions by borrowing money from future generations.”
This stance from McConnell is callous, shortsighted, and potentially self-destructive. It’s just not the case the only blue states will need help in the coming months — every state is going to suffer financially. Without support, that means gigantic cuts to critical state programs and jobs, including teachers and police. Leaving these people out of work, and disrupting the functioning of state governments, will only exacerbate the economic crisis we’ve been thrown into. That’s true whether a state is red or blue.
And even if it were just blue states that needed help, McConnell’s attitude would be catastrophic for everyone. The United States isn’t going to prosper if the economies of states like California, New York, and New Jersey are in free fall. The nation’s economy is deeply interconnected, and many Democratic-run regions contribute an outsized portion of economic growth. Leaving major states to scramble for themselves and fail to fulfill their financial obligations could tumble us into a depression. That’s bad for everyone, and most immediately, that’s bad for Trump in 2020 and McConnell’s beloved Senate majority, who are likely to bear the costs if Americans head to the polls in November with the country’s economy in shambles.
Fortunately, it’s not clear how much leverage McConnell actually has in this matter. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to genuinely want to provide states and local governments with support, and she’s been negotiating with the Republican official who has seemed most reasonable since the economic crisis began: Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. He appears to recognize that it’s in the administration’s best interest to save the economy, so he’s less committed to abiding by GOP orthodoxy or an “own the libs” mentality. And if Mnuchin gets Trump and Pelosi on board with a plan to save the states, it’s not clear McConnell will actually be able to stand in their way.
In recent days, Donald Trump's go-to excuse for why the federal government hasn't done more to ramp up efforts to test Americans for the novel coronavirus — even though such tests are necessary for the economy to successfully reopen — is that this should be the responsibility of state governments.
This article was originally published at Salon
"Governors must be able to step up and get the job done," Trump tweeted Saturday afternoon, while also weirdly declaring that the U.S. was the "King of Ventilators." Is he going to start selling them in late-night infomercials?
When governors complain that they can't ramp up coronavirus testing, because there's nowhere near enough capacity, Trump denies it, claiming that governors "don't want to use all of the capacity that we've created." When asked why testing rates have stayed mostly flat for the past month, Trump of course turns it around and pins blame on the governors, falsely claiming they haven't asked for help.
It should be obvious what's going on: The Trump administration is doing everything possible to hamstring states' capacity to perform the large-scale testing that would be needed to end the lockdowns safely and reopen the economy. When Trump is called out for this, he lies about it. He literally doesn't want more testing. But why?
Maryland's Republican governor, Larry Hogan, told Jake Tapper of CNN, "Every governor in America has been pushing and fighting and clawing to get more tests," and said it was "absolutely false" to claim there's enough testing capacity.
Michigan's Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, also pointed the finger at Trump, saying that her state has "the capacity to double or triple the number of tests that we're doing," but because Trump refuses to enact the Defense Production Act to force the production of those materials, they are falling short.
Hogan got so frustrated with the federal government's inaction that he and his wife, Yumi Hogan (who was born in South Korea) independently negotiated a deal with South Korea to secure half a million test kits for Maryland. But during Monday's propaganda blast (aka coronavirus briefing), rather than congratulating Hogan for taking initiative, Trump was livid, making the clearly false accusation that a nearby governor from his own party didn't do enough to get help from the White House.
Reporting in the Washington Post on Tuesday further illustrates how much Trump is doing whatever he can to slow down coronavirus testing. During negotiations over the latest coronavirus aid bill, the White House did everything it could to shoot down suggestions from both Democrats and Republicans for ways to make coronavirus testing more efficient. While Trump keeps saying he will invoke the Defense Production Act to generate more supplies, he also keeps coming up with excuses for why he hasn't actually done it.
A bit of truth slipped out during Monday's briefing, when Trump muttered, "We really don't need it," apparently referring to the DPA.
The conclusion here is simple, and has been right on the surface all along: Trump doesn't particularly want Americans to be tested for the coronavirus. Some pundits and politicians seem unwilling to draw this conclusion, at least in public, in no small part because it doesn't seem to make sense.
No one is under any illusions that Trump cares about the American public, of course. But mass testing seems like it would clearly be in the president's self-interest. His best chance at winning re-election is for the economy to be safely reopened, and at least partly recover, before November. But that simply can't be done without mass testing. Trying to reopen the economy without doing that, as states like Georgia and South Carolina are planning to do, is just likely to cause the virus to spread more rapidly, which will only worsen the economic downturn.
So why is Trump doing whatever he can to prevent the very thing that would give him the best chance of saving the economy and boosting his re-election chances? Why is a notorious narcissist whose only plausible motivation is his own self-interest not doing the one thing that would benefit him in this crisis?
Because Trump isn't capable of seeing widespread testing — and more accurate information about the spread of the virus — as being in his self-interest. He sees it this way: The more tests that are done, the more confirmed cases are counted, and his impulse is to conceal that larger number if he possibly can. So he's trying to keep the official case count as low as possible through the only method he understands: Lying and cheating. In this case, by preventing testing such that no accurate count is possible.
It's not like he's hidden Trump hasn't hidden this desire from the public.
"I like the numbers being where they are," Trump said back in March, in justifying his decision to prevent passengers on a cruise ship where the coronavirus was spreading from disembarking. His logic was simple, if idiotic: As long as those infected people stayed on the water, Trump didn't have to count them in the "official" numbers, which at that point were extremely low. Manipulating that number matters more to him than the health and well-being of human beings. (In fairness, almost everything matters more to Trump than the health and well-being of his fellow humans.)
Early in the crisis, Trump didn't exactly take pains to hide that he felt that the best way to keep the confirmed case numbers low was to make sure that people with COVID-19 never got an official diagnosis. As NPR reporter Dan Diamond noted on March 12, Trump did not push for aggressive testing, even though that would have slowed the virus, "because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered."
Maybe it's tempting for some folks to believe that Trump has learned his lesson and shifted gears, in the face of overwhelming evidence that mass testing is the only thing that will really make reopening the economy possible. But in reality, telling Donald Trump not to juke the numbers is like telling him not to lie or not to brag about his sexual conquests during what supposed to be a serious occasion. Trump's strongest instinct is to manipulate the statistics. He can no more stop trying to cheat on the numbers than he can stop cheating on his wives.
Lying about statistics is at the heart of who Trump is. The man has never met a number that he didn't think he should immediately improve to flatter himself through straight-up lying and manipulation.
Trump compulsively cheats at golf.
His first act as president was to force his press secretary to lie about the size of his inauguration crowd, and then to force official photographers to edit the photos to make his crowds look bigger.
Trump spent ungodly amounts of effort bullying and manipulating the staff at Forbes to believe he was richer than he was, in order to get on the Forbes 400 list, where he clearly didn't belong.
Trump has lied constantly on both his tax returns and his loan applications to banks.
Trump's favorite game as a real estate developer was to quote one set of numbers to contractors and then, when they finished the job, to renege on the deal and refuse to pay them what was owed.
Trump has obsessively lied about how many women he's slept with, calling tabloid reporters while pretending to be a publicist to plant stories about dating numerous women that were almost certainly not true.
Trump lies about his television ratings from his time as a reality TV host.
Trump relentlessly lies about his poll numbers, and just this week falsely claimed that 96% of Republicans approved of him.
Trump has lied about his charity giving, claiming to have donated millions of dollars when, in fact, he mostly took checks written by other people and passed them off as his own.
As president, Trump never met a number he won't lie about. The Washington Post fact-checker counts 291 lies Trump has told about the economic numbers, 257 lies about the size of the border wall, 197 lies about the size of his tax cuts, and 177 lies about the size of trade deficits with China.
Trump lied about both his hand and penis size during a Republican primary debate, saying, "Look at those hands, are they small hands?" while holding them up and declaring that there was "no problem" with "something else" either. But audiences could see, with their own eyes, that Trump has small hands. As for "something else," I will defer to porn star Stormy Daniels, who had the unpleasant experience of sex with Trump, as the authority on that.
I could go on, but you get the picture. Trump has a compulsive desire to manipulate statistics to flatter himself, even in cases — such as with his hand or inauguration crowd size — where the lie is visible for all to see and he has nothing to gain by pushing it.
Trump lies about numbers compulsively because he has gotten away with it his whole life, mostly by leaving other people to clean up the messes he's made. That's how he managed to survive multiple bankruptcies, which were no doubt caused in large part by his compulsion to manipulating the numbers until it finally caught up with him.
Unfortunately, Trump's instinctive impulse to manipulate numbers has become deadly in the coronavirus era. Trump wants to keep people from getting tested so the official case load in the U.S. remains artificially low. But as long as people aren't getting tested, they'll keep spreading the virus around and more people will get sick. Plus, the lack of testing hurts the economy, keeping people from returning to work and leading to more bankruptcy and more economic hardship.
There's no need to tiptoe around the situation here. Trump is doing everything he can to stop Americans from getting coronavirus tests, and lying about it, because he wants to artificially deflate a number he thinks makes him look bad. His every instinct is to lie and cheat, especially when it comes to concealing truth and manipulating numbers, and he simply will never believe there's any situation he can't lie and cheat his way out of. Understand that, and you understand why we can't have adequate coronavirus testing under this president.
Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is suggesting all 50 states should drop dead, just like former President Gerald Ford infamously said to New York decades ago. The Kentucky Republican fully backed bills giving corporations large and small trillions of dollars in coronavirus bailouts, but now he's drawing the line.
As Senate Majority Leader throughout the entire Trump administration McConnell fully backed the GOP's trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the rich, while falsely claiming they would pay for themselves, and proclaiming the ensuing deficits were "not a Republican problem."
McConnell, meanwhile, has done nothing to rein in this administration's explosion in spending.
Late last year he also managed to corral "more than $1 billion worth of federal spending and tax breaks to his Kentucky constituents, just in time for Christmas and ahead of a potentially tough reelection campaign."
But now that states are experiencing probably the largest loss of revenue since the Great Depression and are spending massive amounts to protect front line workers and the citizenry as a whole – in part thanks to the federal government refusing to provide and then out-bidding them of items like face masks and ventilators – the Republican Senate Majority Leader says the well is dry.
And to him the well is very partisan.
McConnell sat down, virtually, presumably, with right wing pundit Hugh Hewitt Wednesday morning, and the topic quickly moved to money for states.
McConnell's answer?
No.
The 78-year old Kentucky Republican whose net worth in 2018 was estimated at over $34 million, told Hewitt governors "would love to have free money," and said he'd like the states to declare bankruptcy – which they cannot currently do.
“I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route,” the Republican Majority Leader said. “It’s saved some cities, and there’s no good reason for it not to be available. My guess is their first choice would be for the federal government to borrow money from future generations to send it down to them now so they don’t have to do that. That’s not something I’m going to be in favor of."
On his Senate website, a press release calls money for states "Blue State Bailouts," even though his own very red state is exceedingly poor: "Kentucky is ranked the second most federally dependent state in the nation."
McConnell also told Hewitt, "I said yesterday we’re going to push the pause button here, because I think this whole business of additional assistance for state and local governments need to be thoroughly evaluated."
And he decided to frame his answer by attacking state pensions – a topic Hewitt himself introduced for reasons unknown.
"There’s not going to be any desire on the Republican side to bail out state pensions by borrowing money from future generations," said McConnell.
In the midst of a global pandemic, conspiracy theorists have found yet another way to spread dangerous disinformation and misinformation about COVID-19, sowing seeds of doubts about its severity and denying the very existence of the pandemic.
Since March 28, conspiracy theorists — “coronavirus deniers” — have been using the hashtag #FilmYourHospital to encourage people to visit local hospitals to take pictures and videos to prove that the COVID-19 pandemic is an elaborate hoax.
The premise for this conspiracy theory rests on the baseless assumption that if hospital parking lots and waiting rooms are empty then the pandemic must not be real or is not as severe as reported by health authorities and the media.
Of course, there is a simple explanation for why some hospital parking lots and waiting rooms might have been empty. As part of pandemic planning, many hospitals have banned visitors and doctors have had to postpone or cancel elective and non-urgent procedures to free up medical staff and resources. This is in keeping with expert advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other health authorities.
In addition, to slow the spread of the virus and prevent cross infections with non-COVID-19 patients, the CDC also recommended that health-care facilities create separate intake and waiting areas for coronavirus patients and reserve emergency areas for emergencies such as heart attacks and broken arms. Furthermore, with the lockdown, fewer people are exerting and hurting themselves, which has resulted in fewer visits to the emergency department for heart attacks and strokes.
This empty-hospital conspiracy theory joins a parade of false, unproven and misleading claims about the virus that have been making the rounds on social media including allegations that 5G wireless technology somehow plays a role in the spread of the COVID-19 virus, or consuming silver particles or drinking water with lemon prevents or cures you of the virus. None of these are true.
At the Ryerson University Social Media Lab, some of our research investigates how misinformation propagates across different social media platforms. One of the first steps when examining trending topics on social media is to look for signs of social bots — social media accounts designed to act on Twitter and other platforms with some level of autonomy — and coordinated inauthentic behaviour that may include coordinated activities that attempt to artificially manipulate conversations to make them appear more popular than they are.
These two forms of social manipulation, when left unchecked, can skew the conversation, manufacture anger where there is none, suppress opposition or dampen debate. These tactics may undermine our ability as citizens to make decisions and reach consensus as a society.
This new conspiracy campaign against the media and public health officials, with hospitals and medical staff caught in the middle, started on March 28 with a simple tweet by a Twitter user posing a question: “#FilmYourHospital Can this become a thing?”
For our analysis, we collected a sample dataset consisting of nearly 100,000 #FilmYourHospital public tweets and retweets posted by 43,000 public accounts on Twitter from March 28, the beginning of this campaign, until April 9.
Our analysis suggests that while the #FilmYourHospital campaign on Twitter is full of misleading and false COVID-19 claims, most of the active and influential accounts behind it don’t appear to be automated. However, we did find signs of ad hoc co-ordination among conservative internet personalities and far-right groups attempting to take a baseless conspiracy theory and turn it into a weapon against their political opponents.
Importantly, we found that while much of the content came from users with limited reach, the oxygen that fuelled this conspiracy in its early days came from just a handful of prominent conservative politicians and far right political activists like @DeAnna4Congress, @realcandaceo and @DonnaWR8. These power users employed the #FilmYourHospital hashtag to build awareness about the campaign and to encourage their followers to film what’s happening in their local hospitals. After the initial boost by a few prominent accounts, the campaign was mostly sustained by pro-Trump supporters, followed by a secondary wave of propagation outside the U.S.
As part of our ongoing research on COVID-19 misinformation, we developed the COVID-19 Misinformation Portal that features a range of resources to inform and inoculate Canadians against false and misleading claims about the pandemic. This includes documenting coronavirus claims debunked by professional fact checkers, and a Twitter dashboard tracking the presence of possible bot accounts.
In normal times, outlandish conspiracies like this might make us shake our heads, but as COVID-19 cases continue to stalk the hallways of nursing homes in Canada and fill beds in New York hospitals, it is harder to ignore such upsetting conspiracies from the dark recesses of the internet.
The rise of this conspiracy from a single tweet reminds us that while the spread of misinformation can be mitigated by fact-checking and directing people to credible sources of information from public health agencies, false and misleading claims that are driven by politics and supported by strong convictions and not science are much harder to root out.
By Anatoliy Gruzd, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Social Media Data Stewardship, Ryerson University and Philip Mai, Senior Researcher and Director of Business and Communications, Social Media Lab, Ryerson University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Back on April 13, President Trump made an astonishing declaration, even for him, and he's made some doozies. You may recall that this was the briefing at which he showed a strange campaign-style video featuring compliments from Democratic officials, which had clearly been inspired by a very similar compilation shown the night before on Sean Hannity's Fox News show, already a de facto Trump celebration hour.
This article was originally published at Salon
It was also the appearance in which he repeatedly made the claim that he had "total authority" to reopen the government and blathered on about how he'd saved hundreds of thousands of lives when he supposedly "closed" the country in the first place.
Kaitlan Collins of CNN asked him a question I think we all were wondering at that point:
You said, "When someone is president of the United States, their authority is total." That is not true. Who — who told you that?
Trump didn't answer. The next day Trump announced that it would be up to the governors to decide when they wanted to open up. (He said he would "authorize" them to do it, even though they don't need any such authorization.) Various media outlets have reported that he was convinced to do this because it would be better for his electoral prospects if he can blame the governors for whatever goes wrong with the reopening.
Trump has often touted his alleged total authority, saying on one famous occasion that Article II of the Constitution gives him "the right to do whatever I want as president." But when Collins asked him that question I was pretty sure I knew who told him that. The most powerful legal authority in the administration who believes that the president has almost unlimited power is Attorney General William Barr.
Barr made an appearance on Laura Ingraham's show not long ago — I wrote about it here — and made some comments at the time which give us a clue about how he sees the president's authority in this circumstance. Ingraham went on a tear about forcing churches to close during the pandemic and Barr correctly pointed out that unless the state was singling out religious institutions for closure while allowing other large gatherings, the First Amendment had not been violated.
What came next in that conversation reveals Barr's real agenda, however, and possibly that of all the other schemers in the administration. At the time of the interview, the first rumblings from the astroturf groups in various swing states with Democratic governors were starting to be heard. Barr was on it already:
I think we have to be very careful to make sure this is — you know, that the draconian measures that are being adopted are fully justified, and there are not alternative ways of protecting people. And I think, you know, when this — when this period of time is — at the end of April expires, I think we have to allow people to adapt more than we have and not just tell people to go home and hide under the bed, but allow them to use other ways — social distancing and other means — to protect themselves.
Since then we've had heavily-covered small protests like this around the country demanding that governors rescind their stay-at-home orders:
At least they were wearing masks.
On Tuesday, Barr appeared on Hugh Hewitt's show and made clear that if anyone thought the top law enforcement officer in the country might find armed protests against public health measures to be a threat to public order, they needed to think again. He reiterated his belief that the states have imposed unnecessary and draconian measures and implicitly backed the protests, calling stay-at-home orders "disturbingly close to house arrest."
The legal issues he believes are salient are civil liberties and something vague to do with interstate commerce. If I had to guess, I'd suggest that Barr intends to argue that states that are not open for business are somehow impinging on other states' rights to conduct business across state lines. Either that, or he anticipates that there really will be checkpoints on the highways as infected people from Trump states decide to descend upon others. In any case, he announced that the federal government will join individual lawsuits to force states to open, whatever the task force guidelines endorsed by Vice President Pence may say.
According to the Detroit News, Barr has the support of the man who was widely considered the worst attorney general of recent history, Reagan administration stalwart Ed Meese. Apparently, Meese and some other right-wing extremists wrote to Barr earlier this week, accusing the states of "rampant abuses of constitutional rights and civil liberties" and exhorting him "to undertake an immediate review of all the orders that have been issued by the states and local governments across the nation."
Is it possible that these people are unaware that these measures are being taken all over the world to contain a deadly virus? Do they think these governors are doing this out of some twisted ideological desire to destroy their constituents' livelihoods and their states' tax bases? Apparently so.
It's hard to know how widely Barr plans to use Department of Justice levers to force Americans to risk their lives for Donald Trump. But he is definitely figuring out ways to help make that happen.
For a man without a medical degree or any other relevant expertise, he seems confident that he knows more than the public health experts about how to deal with a deadly pandemic:
You can't just keep on feeding the patient chemotherapy and say well, we're killing the cancer, because we were getting to the point where we're killing the patient. And now is the time that we have to start looking ahead and adjusting to more targeted therapies.
If there is a worse analogy for what we're going through, I haven't heard it.
At the moment, social distancing is the only way we have of mitigating the spread of the disease and killing tens of thousands of people unnecessarily. There is no "targeted therapy," metaphorical or otherwise. But Trump and Barr and the rest of the nihilist right are telling Americans that they should ignore all the scientific expertise and go out and play Russian roulette in workplaces, malls and restaurants, all in the name of freedom and liberty.
It's true that Barr hasn't said that Trump can simply issue an "order" forcing these state governments to go against all the pubic health recommendations. But he has almost certainly told him that the Department of Justice can figure out how to get the job done. There is more than one way to exercise "total authority."
Copyright © 2025 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 |
Masthead
|
Privacy Policy
|
Manage Preferences
|
Debug Logs
For corrections contact
corrections@rawstory.com
, for support contact
support@rawstory.com
.
