Southern California was the scene of a large, anti-lockdown protest on Friday.
"Large crowds opposing the state’s coronavirus stay-at-home mandate took to the streets of downtown Huntington Beach Friday, a day after the governor closed Orange County beaches and drew frustration and criticism from some residents and city leaders," The Orange County Registerreported Friday.
"More than a thousand protesters gathered near the Huntington Beach pier shortly before noon. The tightly packed crowd, with most people not wearing protective masks, repeatedly chanted 'U.S.A.' as they waited for the demonstration to begin," the newspaper noted.
The protesters were blasted online, here's some of what people were saying:
On Friday, a House committee revealed that the White House has blocked Dr. Anthony Fauci from testifying to Congress next week about the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic.
New White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany gave her first briefing on Friday, an event she indicated would be one of many going forward. And it went about exactly as well as could be expected.
Which is to say that it was a whirlwind of lies, deception, trumped-up outrage, braggadocio, and deflection.
In some ways, it was an improvement over some of the worst performances of her predecessors (leaving out Stephanie Grisham, who never held a single briefing while on the job). She didn’t begin in a completely combative stance, and she didn’t verbally abuse or berate reporters. But we’re not grading on a curve. A press secretary should be judged on their honesty, public service, and decorum, and on all three, McEnany was a disaster.
Early on in the briefing, she told the reporters: “I will never lie to you, you have my word on that.”
But this didn’t last long.
She warped and shaded the truth when she discussed President Donald Trump’s recent tweets about protesters in Michigan.
“The president was referencing generally that in this country you have a First Amendment right to protest,” she said. However, this is highly misleading.
As CNN’s Daniel Dale pointed out, Trump was quite specific in his tweet: “The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire. These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal.” This wasn’t about a general right to protest; it was about a frightening event that included armed men menacing a government building.
Asked about the accusations of sexual misconduct against Trump, McEnany brushed them off.
“The president has swiftly denied all of these allegations that were raised four years ago. He’s always told the truth on these issues,” she said. She said the issue has been settled — and she slammed the reporters for even bringing it up — because it has been “asked and answered in the form of the vote of the American people.”
Of course, a win in the electoral college doesn’t settle the factual dispute about whether sexual abuse occurred. But even more deceptively, McEnany’s question obscured the many sexual misconduct allegations that have come out since the election, including one of the most disturbing accusations: the account of rape from E. Jean Carroll. She first made the accusation publicly in June of 2019.
It’s also preposterous to say that Trump has “always told the truth” about the allegations against him. It’s exceedingly likely that Trump has lied about many of the cases, and some of his defenses have been provably false. For instance, he claimed he had never met Carroll, even though a photo showed them together.
When McEnany, unprompted, brought up the case of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn — which has garnered extensive attention from right-wing media in recent days — she was even more directly dishonest. She claimed new notes produced in the case showed that an FBI official wrote about the interview with the NSA: ‘We need to get Flynn to lie,’ quote, and get him fired.”
In a follow-up with a reporter, she was yet more explicit, claiming the FBI wrote: “We want to get someone to lie.”
But this claim misrepresented the much more ambiguous statement that the note actually contained, which was: “What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” Experts on federal law enforcement have argued that the notes show nothing out of line with usual typical FBI tactics — despite McEnany’s claim that Flynn was targeted politically — though it’s still worth debating the propriety of these law enforcement methods.
A reporter pointed out to McEnany that, regardless of the evidence produced, it’s still a fact that Flynn pleaded guilty to the charge of lying to the FBI. Absurdly, after bringing up the case on her own, she said she didn’t want to get “involved” in a discussion about it.
And then, by the end of the briefing, she decided to repeat some of the president’s favorite lies.
She said the Russiainvestigation culminated in “$40 million of taxpayer money being lost and the complete and total exoneration of President Trump.”
“The final total was $32M, per official figures,” noted Dale, pointing out that the government “expected to recoup about $17M; Mueller report explicitly said it didn’t exonerate [the president].”
The “anti-lockdown” and #Reopen protests in the U.S. have powerful and secretive backers, but there are real Americans on the streets expressing their opinions.
As an ethnographer – someone who studies cultural participation – I’m interested in who those Americans are, and why they’re upset.
I spent the last week in what you might call an online road trip, studying 30 posts of protest footage from events in 15 cities. I found some shared themes, which don’t fit well with popular narratives about these protests.
Protesters object to handouts, but want work.
1. Poverty is taboo, but work is ‘essential’
Despite the economic toll the lockdowns are taking on America’s poor, no protesters put their own poverty on display, such as posting signs asking for help.
Instead, they held signs with more general language, like “Poverty Kills,” or expressed concerns like the restaurateur in Phoenix, Arizona, who told a passing videographer he was worried about his 121 “suffering, devastated” employees.
Their messages made clear that they didn’t want to ask for a handout or charity – but they were asking to be allowed to work. Protesters across many states asserted their work – or even all work – was “essential.”
In one video from an “Operation Gridlock” protest in Lansing, Michigan, where activists planned to block traffic, a protester filmed out the window of his car when he drove past a sign saying “Give me work not money.” The protester himself called out in approval, “Give me work not money, I hear that!”
A young man at an Olympia, Washington, event described work as a source not only of money but identity: “I wanna go back to work! That pride that you feel every day when you go home from work? That’s like nothing that can … be taken.”
Protest signs in Denver, Colorado, included the plaintive “I want my career back” and the entrepreneurial “Dogs Need Groomers.”
Outside the Missouri Capitol on April 21, some protesters wore masks – though others didn’t.
Despite alarming news reports that protesters were ignoring social distancing, many of the protesters observed safety guidelines. Photos showed at least some people wearing masks. A TikTok video recruiting participants for Michigan’s Operation Gridlock encouraged protesters to be safe; drone footage shows that most participants at the state capitol stayed in their cars, away from other people.
Protesters’ signs didn’t really downplay the threat of the virus, but rather compared it with potential harm from the lockdown. For instance, a sign in Denver was headed “Trading Lives” and featured a scale with virus deaths on one side, with unemployment, suicide and homelessness on the other.
Protesters in cars are, in general, observing social distancing guidelines.
3. Anti-science displays are on the fringe
There were protesters at several rallies who wore anti-vaccination T-shirts and held signs suggesting they don’t trust public health experts and scientists.
At the other events, it appeared protesters had been expecting higher numbers of infections than actually happened. Rather than seeing that as evidence of the success of social distancing, they seemed to interpret this as saying the science was no longer valid. “The models were wrong” was on more than one sign, suggesting protesters had paid attention to the scientific models at first but had come to believe the disease’s seriousness had been exaggerated.
Idahoans rally to fight the outbreak’s effects in ways they have dealt with more familiar problems.
4. People want to fight the virus in familiar ways
Even when protesters acknowledged the threat of the virus, few of them were calling for medical experts to provide the solution. I saw none of the demonstrators calling for more widespread testing, for instance.
However, the protesters wanted to fight the virus in ways that were more familiar to them and, perhaps, more empowering: In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a giant green truck had “Jesus is my vaccine” scrawled on its side.
Some protesters demanded governments allow people to make their own decisions, and even displayed the pro-choice slogan “My Body My Choice.” Others showed up with guns. One man in Frankfort, Kentucky, blew a shofar, a Jewish religious instrument made from a ram’s horn blown at the start of a battle.
Armed protesters were among the crowd in Michigan on April 30.
In many of the events across different states, protesters objected to what they called “tyranny,” and held up the Revolution-era “Don’t Tread On Me” Gadsden flag to symbolize their resistance to government rules. They were not objecting to President Donald Trump’s April 13 declaration that, as president, his “authority is total” over the nation.
Instead they were objecting to governors’ lockdown rules, which they highlighted as overreaching their power. Many protesters likened the government’s behavior to Nazis, with protesters adding “Heil” before Democratic governors’ names.
Michigan protesters speak out about their concerns.
6. Race is a factor
One clearly visible theme in the #Reopen protests is how white the attendees are – but not just in terms of their own race. Their compassion also seemed limited to fellow white people. None that I saw were calling attention to the fact that the coronavirus doesn’t hit all populations equally: Blacks and other racial minorities had less access to high-quality health care before the outbreak, and as a result are less healthy and less able to fight off the virus when it strikes.
There was overt racism toward the Chinese, too, echoing words of the president and other political leaders, as on the Jefferson City, Missouri, sign that read “Tyranny is spreading faster than the China virus.”
There’s potential for a wider movement.
7. Divided and distanced, is it a movement?
Most protesters did not refer to these protests as a movement. I found just one video offering a vision that they could form one. In that livestream from Operation Gridlock, at one point the videographer shouted, “‘merica!”
Then, his unseen companion replied in a meditative tone about the potential he saw on that road: “Together we’re strong, divided we’re weak. That’s the establishment’s biggest fear, for the people to get together and not be divided. … That’s what they fear the most. Because we have the power.” It was not clear if those people with the power included the much greater number of people across America who were sheltered in place.
It can’t be said often enough. The biggest political story of the year isn’t the 2020 election. It isn’t the pandemic. It isn’t its death toll (64,000 and counting). It isn’t the record-breaking number of unemployed (30 million). It isn’t Donald Trump making everything, and I mean everything, much worse than it needed to be. It sure as hell isn’t those “ersatz phallus swingers” intimidating Michigan legislators with long guns.
No, the biggest story is so big as to be invisible. It’s so obvious as to be silent. The biggest political story of the year is the tens of millions of Americans sheltering in place for the sake of their own well-being and safety, and for the sake of all Americans. (The second-biggest story is Americans who are not paid to risk their lives risking their lives by working in grocery stories, pharmacies, gas stations, and nursing homes.)
Staying home might not seem like a political act. After all, what’s political about being scared of catching the coronavirus, which is a death sentence to the elderly and causes even 40-something men and women to stroke out? But please. Make no mistake. It is.
It’s as political as “jackbooted thugs” storming state capitals (to borrow the NRA’s favorite form of slander). It’s as political as the president sidestepping any and all accountability for the United States having the highest tally of dead compared to all industrialized nations combined. It’s as political as the Republican Party giving away billions of dollars in goodies to friends. It’s as political as Trump rushing the country back to some semblance of normal, risking a second wave more deadly than the first.
But more than that, it’s a better politics, and it’s a better politics, because it’s moral.
You are staying home not only for your benefit, but for everyone’s benefit. Yes, it’s driving you crazy. Yes, it’s driving your kids crazy, which drives you more crazy. But millions seem to believe such sacrifice is necessary and right, which is not only small-d democratic, it’s small-r republican. Staying home means staying healthy (or at least not getting sick), which means we are actualizing, willingly it or not, the Good Life.
This is important for a number of reasons. One is that the biggest political story of the year doesn’t get the degree of attention it deserves. (It’s understandable why white men wielding semiautomatic rifles cause alarm, but these people should not be confused for a majority perspective. They represent a vanishingly small minority of chuds.) Importantly, the president won the last election vowing to make America great again. While Trump is failing, most Americans are following a far more prudent course.
Even more important, however, is what the pandemic is revealing about the American character, traits and qualities demanded of a nation committed to democracy. I yield to no one is my animosity toward fascism and a major party laboring to establish 21st-century apartheid. But I concede to the need to step back and marvel at the courage, patience and stamina of the millions of us doing what’s right. The challenge is only beginning. But no challenge can be overcome without the right kind of liberal spirit.
I confess to being skeptical. Trump’s election seemed to suggest an electorate that had forgotten the old democratic faith, a republic grown tired and no longer feeling the thrill of saying the words, at the end of the allegiance, with liberty and justice for all. Trump’s victory signaled the rise of a “nation” within a nation, one already at war with the other but that did not desire disunion as much as domination without complaint.
Since then, however, the people seem to have awakened, or at least cracked open a sleepy eye, not only to what an authoritarian has done but also to what the people themselves allowed to be done. I hope now that voters realize a president willing to extort governors into being “nice” to him in the thick of a pandemic is of a piece with a president willing to extort a foreign leader into sabotaging an election. I hope now that voters realize the same president vowing to make America great again is the most anti-American president of their lifetimes. I hope now that a majority of the people realizes beating fascism takes unity and the overwhelming demonstration of power.
Presidents, leaders, institutions, and laws don’t make a nation. (Borders sure as hell don’t). What makes a nation is its people, and what makes a people is its character. Yes, some of us want to destroy us. But most of us don’t. Indeed, most of us want to do what’s right for everyone. The biggest political story of the year is tens of millions of Americans staying home for their sakes and for the benefit of the common good.
“America First,” has been a pronouncement of pride for President Donald Trump and millions of his supporters. Today they have gotten their wish as the United States leads the world during a global deadly pandemic, racing well past other nations in the numbers of COVID-19 infections and deaths. It may not be the “first place” spot that they desire or expect. But it should come as no surprise, for anyone paying attention to the deliberate design of the U.S. economy and infrastructure could have predicted the pandemic’s impact. And indeed, our national hubris may have been our biggest weakness.
The pressure to conform to the delusions of American exceptionalism has blinded us to our vulnerabilities. We have ignored the perils of our health care system because America was too great to fail. We have looked past ever-increasing wealth inequality because the riches of the wealthy were a measure of our greatness. We have dismissed racial and gender disparities because to admit them would mar the shine of mythical America.
Over many decades, successive administrations have sucked up our collective resources in order to nurture the military and line the pockets of the ultrarich, leaving our social safety net so threadbare that we might as well be on our own. Throughout this crisis, Americans have received little guidance from the federal government beyond dangerous speculations of unproven treatments. A nation with a patchwork private/public health care system that is expensive to run and offers little protection when we need it the most was destined to fail in a widespread health crisis. Conservative forces have shaped the U.S. into a society where the notion of “survival of the fittest” guides us. And indeed, in recent weeks conservatives have even said out loud what was usually implied—that the weakest among us may well die, and that is perfectly fine as long as the stock market continues to boom.
Our national hubris has been a bipartisan affair. Even President Barack Obama tended to fall into the trap, invoking American exceptionalism often in his speeches. But as the COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated with clarity, ideas of the U.S.’s superiority have essentially been delusions of grandeur. They have blinded us to the inevitable failures of an empire that invested in military jets over Medicare for All. Being the world’s wealthiest nation and having the world’s mightiest military means nothing in the face of a crisis like the one we face now—or in the face of future crises like catastrophic climate change.
It is tempting to consider that President Donald Trump’s ineptitude is what is killing so many Americans, but his negligence is deliberate. For months Trump ignored the warning signs of the virus that he was presented with by his own intelligence agencies. Months more passed since the pandemic was declared with no serious, medically guided federal plan to tackle the crisis beyond passing on responsibility to state governments and above all, a desire to reopen the economy. Trump has no plan to save actual lives. His only goal is to buoy those economic indicators that he is relying on touting as a basis for reelection.
It is in this context that the New York Times on April 23 published a report about the disappointment among outsiders at the state of America under Trump’s presidency, ravaged by the coronavirus. Titled, “‘Sadness’ and Disbelief From a World Missing American Leadership,” writer Katrin Bennhold lamented how the pandemic is, “perhaps the first global crisis in more than a century where no one is even looking to the United States for leadership.” Two days later the same paper published another piece on the same topic titled, “Will a Pandemic Shatter the Perception of American Exceptionalism?” In it, writer Jennifer Schuessler explores a profound “struggle to reconcile the crisis with the nation’s self-image.” But America was never exceptional in the ways that historians and self-declared pundits have imagined.
Offering a harsher and more honest view of the U.S., Calvin Woodward wrote in Associated Press one day after Bennhold’s piece was published that, “Coronavirus shakes the conceit of ‘American exceptionalism.’” Woodward pithily wrote, “A nation with unmatched power, brazen ambition and aspirations through the arc of history to be humanity’s ‘shining city upon a hill’ cannot come up with enough simple cotton swabs despite the wartime manufacturing and supply powers assumed by President Donald Trump.” Perhaps the most cringe-inducing critique of American exceptionalism came from Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole, who wrote, that the “one emotion that has never been directed toward the U.S. until now” is “pity.”
It should embarrass all Americans that while other nations have organized well-thought-out, science-based and aggressive approaches to slowing down the virus spread, the wealthiest nation on the planet has failed so spectacularly on the public stage. It might be funny except that more Americans have died from COVID-19 than were killed during the Vietnam war.
But America’s actions have been an embarrassment well before this pandemic. Even setting aside the origins of this land’s conquest paid for by the blood of indigenous Americans, or the building of economic might on the backs of enslaved Africans, our history is marked with blood, inequality, incarceration, mass shootings, war, waste, over-consumption, and pollution—all rooted in self-righteous nationalism.
The truth is America does stand out—in some of the worst ways. We are exceptional for having survived so long without a national health program, and for continuing to tolerate obscene inequality that constantly favors the wealthy over the rest of us. This nation is exceptional for imprisoning a larger percentage of our population than any other nation and for continuing to live with the constant specter of gun violence. We are exceptional in being at war for most of the past several centuries. And of course, we are exceptional in having a population large enough to elect a president as horrifying as Donald Trump. These are truly the things that have made America exceptional.
Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
States that spent millions of dollars fighting the coronavirus asked the federal government for help plugging huge holes in their budgets.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gave them the finger instead.
The Kentucky Republican said he’d rather let states go bankrupt than come to their aid. He claims they’d have funds to weather the crisis if they didn’t spend money on frivolous things like pensions for cops and road workers.
It’s just like McConnell to exploit the pandemic for his right-wing, small-government, anti-worker agenda.
Withholding money from cash-starved states or letting them declare bankruptcy would lead to draconian slashes in social welfare programs and layoffs of state troopers, corrections officers and other essential workers. And, as McConnell desires, states would face pressure to renege on pensions for workers and retirees.
The cuts would increase poverty, send income inequality soaring to even higher levels and break what’s left of the middle class.
In his long war on workers, this is McConnell’s most morally bankrupt ploy yet.
When the Trump administration failed to provide respirators and other personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers, states scrounged supplies on their own. The federal government failed to deliver ventilators needed to keep critically ill patients breathing, so governors scavenged those as well.
Shortages of these items even forced states into bidding wars, something that drove up the budget deficits that McConnell now refuses to help governors address.
If states hadn’t spent this money, more people would have died.
On top of the money spent fighting the coronavirus, states lost billions in tax revenue as businesses closed and workers lost their jobs because of the pandemic.
Governors justifiably turned to the federal government for help.
But McConnell suggested that states would be able to ride out the crisis if they hadn’t made “bad decisions” on issues like pensions for public workers.
He said he wouldn’t fund “blue state bailouts,” a shot at Democratic-controlled states that actually do the right thing and provide dignified retirements to government workers.
McConnell never stared down a gunman like state troopers do. He never had a prisoner spit on him, a hazard corrections officers face all the time.
But he thinks pensions for the people who do these tough jobs—and right now do them with the added risk of catching COVID-19—are unnecessary.
CEO compensation increased 940 percent since 1978 while worker pay generally stagnated. As the economy expanded, corporations pocketed the profits instead of sharing them with the workers who generated them.
But workers who were barely making it a few months ago now face all-out financial ruin because of COVID-19. The virus already cost more than 30 million Americans their jobs, and the unemployment surge comes just as states run out of money for the safety-net programs that would help sustain laid-off workers.
Because of the coronavirus, income inequality worsened almost overnight.
The growing concentration of wealth in a few hands threatens the American ideal as much as any virus. Rich people and corporations use their money to monopolize the political system and get politicians like McConnell to do their bidding.
That’s how the 2017 tax cut happened.
Instead of looking for new ways to undercut workers, McConnell could use his enormous power to help them survive.
He could push through legislation forcing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to develop an emergency, temporary infectious disease standard requiring that employers take certain steps to protect workers from COVID-19.
McConnell also could force Congress to pass a bill that provides payments for health care benefits for laid-off workers, ensuring they don’t have to dip into their own dwindling finances to maintain coverage during the pandemic.
And at a time when so many Americans are experiencing financial anxiety, McConnell could pass a bill protecting the pensions of about 1.3 million workers and retirees enrolled in private-sector multiemployer pension plans that were failing even before the pandemic hit.
The House already passed legislation shoring up these plans, but McConnell refused to hold a vote in the Senate. He doesn’t think private-sector workers deserve decent retirements any more than public workers do.
As much as Americans struggle now, McConnell’s refusal to assist states with pandemic costs would create more hardship.
Layoffs of police officers would turn parts of the country into crime zones. Cuts to education and training programs would deny disadvantaged Americans a path forward. Pension defaults would increase demand for safety-net programs, which states would shut down for lack of funds.
And cash-strapped states would be forced to consider cuts to hospitals and other medical services, leaving their residents vulnerable to a return of the coronavirus.
It isn’t only people in blue states who would suffer, either.
Kentucky, McConnell’s home state, is one of the poorest in America. If McConnell refuses to help states with COVID-19 burdens, Kentuckians will face service cuts, layoffs and pension shortfalls, too.
As the pandemic death toll mounts and states struggle to keep the lights on, McConnell is focused on one thing—capitalizing on the crisis at the expense of working Americans.
The last couple of weeks have obviously been very hard for President Trump. His public mood has been even more volatile than usual. What with being humiliated for showing his monumental ignorance on national television when he tasked his government scientists with studying the possibility of injecting disinfectant into the human body to "clean the lungs" and then finding out that his fantastic miracle cure, hydroxychloroquine, appears to make people worse rather than better, it's been a rough time.
His White House coronavirus rallies have been canceled for the time being, cooler heads having evidently persuaded Trump that they were doing him more harm than good. Now he's gone back to his usual short pool sprays and semi-formal events with visitors, where he takes a few questions until some staffer screams at the top of her lungs for the press to get out of the room immediately. The hope, obviously, is that he will get in less trouble the less he's exposed to hard questions.
It doesn't really help. He's definitely brittle and out of sorts, resorting to the kind of magical thinking he was using back in January and February when he was living in denial about the approaching catastrophe.
— (@)
Trump is also having a hard time dealing with "the numbers." You'll recall that just a month ago, out of the blue, Trump started talking about lifting the federal COVID-19 guidelines by Easter and "filling the pews" because someone had whispered to him that the "cure is worse than the disease." Health experts rushed to show him models that showed millions of possible deaths if everyone just went back to "normal," as he seemed to be suggesting. So he backed off and agreed to extend lockdown guidelines until the end of April. At the time he made it pretty clear that if we were below the then-proposed estimate of 120,000 deaths, he planned to take a victory lap. Since then, he's gotten more specific — and a bit overconfident — and predicted that the total death toll would likely be between 50,000 and 60,000. We passed that number this week, with no particular indication that the end is near.
From the beginning, Trump's primary goal was to "keep his numbers down," but the virus just refuses to cooperate. With the willy-nilly reduction or abandonment of mitigation strategies all over the country, we can be pretty sure those numbers aren't going down anytime soon. Most experts agree that there will be a spike in new cases in the fall.
But there's another reason for Trump's funk, and it also has to do with his numbers. I'm speaking, of course, about his poll numbers. Numerous reports in the press this week have suggested that Trump has been going ballistic over internal polls showing that he's losing to Joe Biden, both nationwide and in key swing states.
CNN first reported that Trump had blown up at campaign manager Brad Parscale over the phone, screaming, "I'm not losing to Joe Biden." This prompted Parscale to jump on a plane to D.C. to give the president some personal hand-holding. Having been soothed with some good old-fashioned magical thinking, Trump has now calmed down a little, and told Reuters on Wednesday that he just doesn't believe the polls, not even his own:
I don't believe the polls. I believe the people of this country are smart. And I don't think that they will put a man in who's incompetent.
I'm afraid that ship has sailed. And it's not working out too well.
The strange thing is that the polls really aren't much different than they have been all along. I think the real reason he was so upset is that he's always counted on his rallies to serve as a check on the numbers, and to feed his ego. This is a person who believes his "gut" is infallible, and when he stands before his ecstatic, shrieking MAGA crowds, his gut tells him that he is beloved by the American people. With no rallies, he doesn't get that affirmation and it's bringing him down.
Meanwhile, the campaign is trying to get him to back off the day-to-day focus on task force matters and refocus the campaign on China-bashing. The New York Times reported a few days ago that Republicans are convinced "that elevating China as an archenemy culpable for the spread of the virus, and harnessing America's growing animosity toward Beijing, may be the best way to salvage a difficult election."
It's a natural go-to for a man whose calling cards are racism and xenophobia. The problem here is that the administration is using the power of the federal government to help his campaign. Again. (You may recall he had a little impeachment issue a few months back about that very issue. No harm, no foul, apparently!)
Just a few days after the media reported on this big GOP plan, the White House decided to dust off the Dick Cheney playbook and instruct the intelligence community to find evidence to support the theory that the virus outbreak began in a government biodefense lab in the city of Wuhan.
On Thursday, they reported back and it wasn't good news for Trump. They found no evidence that the virus was anything but naturally occurring. Of course. Trump wasn't impressed:
— (@)
Trump answered the follow-up question, about whether he had seen any evidence that the virus came from a lab by saying, "Yes, I have" but claiming he wasn't "allowed" to say where he got the information. Since he didn't get it from actual intelligence sources, it likely came from his team of medical and China experts — meaning Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham.
Apparently, Trump wants people to believe the Chinese may have created or released a deadly virus in order to destroy his chances of re-election. He told Reuters, "China will do anything they can to have me lose this race." As always, it's all about him.
But that's not all. Regardless of the truth of the matter, Trump is forging ahead with this plan to attack and punish China, as Dan Froomkin of Salon and Press Watch reported on Thursday evening. The New York Times reports that the Trump administration is discussing stripping China of "sovereign immunity," which would hypothetically allow the U.S. or its citizens to sue the Chinese government, Trump's favorite retaliatory gambit. According to the Times, "legal experts say an attempt to limit China's sovereign immunity would be extremely difficult to accomplish and may require congressional legislation." Unidentified White House officials have also reportedly discussed having the U.S. cancel its debt obligations to China.
That's entirely absurd. Jonathan Chait at New York magazine points out "the blowback would be enormous" as "other potential buyers of Treasury bills would be demanding higher interest rates forever." Talk about the cure being worse than the disease.
But none of this will actually happen. As Chait astutely observes, this is modeled on Trump's famous promise that Mexico would pay for the wall — this time, China will pay for the coronavirus. It's a campaign strategy, not a policy. With Trump, that's all there is.
It's just one more sign that an empire in decline goes slowly at first, and then all at once. And when a declining empire takes on a rising superpower, history suggests it won't go well for the former.
Donald Trump has spent a lifetime exploiting chaos for personal gain and blaming others for his losses. The pure madness in America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic – shortages of equipment to protect hospital workers, dwindling supplies of ventilators and critical medications, jaw-dropping confusion over how $2.2 trillion of aid in the recent coronavirus law will be distributed – has given him the perfect cover to hoard power and boost his chances of reelection.
As the death toll continues to climb and states are left scrambling for protective gear and crucial resources, Trump is focused on only one thing: himself.
He’s told governors to find life-saving equipment on their own, claiming the federal government is “not a shipping clerk” and subsequently forcing states and cities into a ruthless bidding war.
Governors have been reduced to begging FEMA for supplies from the dwindling national stockpile, with vastly different results. While we haven’t seen what “formula” FEMA supposedly has for determining who gets what, reports suggest that Trump’s been promising things to governors who can get him on the phone.
Our narcissist-in-chief has ordered FEMA to circumvent their own process and send supplies to states that are “appreciative”.
Michigan and Colorado have received fractions of what they need while Oklahoma and Kentucky have gotten more than what they asked for. Colorado and Massachusetts have confirmed shipments only to have them held back by FEMA. Ron DeSantis, the Trump-aligned governor of Florida, refused to order a shelter-in-place mandate for weeks, but then received 100% of requested supplies within 3 days. New Jersey waited for two weeks. New York now has more cases than any other single country, but Trump barely lifted a finger for his hometown because Governor Andrew Cuomo is “complaining” about the catastrophic lack of ventilators in the city.
A backchannel to the president is a shoe-in way to secure life-saving supplies. Personal flattery seems to be the most effective currency with Trump; the chain of command runs straight through his ego, and that’s what the response has been coordinated around.
He claims that as president he has “total authority” over when to lift quarantine and social distancing guidelines, and threatens to adjourn Congress himself so as to push through political appointees without Senate confirmation.
And throughout all of this, Trump has been determined to reject any attempt of independent oversight into his administration’s disastrous response.
When he signed the $2 trillion emergency relief package into law, he said he wouldn’t agree to provisions in the bill for congressional oversight – meaning the wheeling-and-dealing will be done in secret.
He has removed the inspector general leading the independent committee tasked with overseeing the implementation of the massive bill.
He appointed one of his own White House lawyers, who helped defend him in his impeachment trial, to oversee the distribution of the $500 billion slush fund for corporations. That same day, he fired Inspector General Michael Atkinson – the inspector general who handed the whistleblower complaint to Congress that ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment.
There should never have been any doubt that Trump would try to use this crisis to improve his odds of re-election.
Stimulus checks going to the lowest-income earners were delayed because Trump demanded each one of them bear his name. As millions of the hardest-hit Americans scrambled to put food on the table and worried about the stack of bills piling up, Trump’s chief concern was himself.
It doesn’t matter that this is a global pandemic. Abusing his power for personal gain is Trump’s MO.
Just three and a half months ago, Trump was impeached on charges of abuse of power and obstructing investigations. Telling governors that they need to “be appreciative” in order to receive life-saving supplies for their constituents is the same kind of quid pro quo that Trump tried to extort from Ukraine, and his attempts to thwart independent oversight are the same as his obstruction of Congress.
Trump called his impeachment a “hoax.” He initially called the coronavirus a “hoax.” But the real hoax is his commitment to America. In reality he will do anything—anything—to hold on to power.
To Donald Trump, the coronavirus crisis is just another opportunity.
The medical director of the emergency department at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, Dr. Lorna Breen, 49, died by suicide this week, not while she was in the thick of emergency work in the nation’s epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic but afterward, while she was staying at her family home. She recounted to her father the devastating toll the virus took on patients. Shortly following her was another frontline emergency medical worker, John Mondello, 23, who is said to have experienced anxiety around the amount of death he saw, which affected him as a “heavy experience when he’d fail to save a life.”
Trauma is often seen as a normal reaction to an abnormal situation; traumatic effects are greater when the abnormal situation is human-caused. Moral injury is felt at a personal level where social injury occurs. Many rightly see these losses as a harbinger of the mental health crisis that is to come, perhaps much bigger than we are currently able to imagine, if we considered the human contribution to the tragedy.
What people find the hardest to cope with is not the suffering itself but the knowledge of what human beings are capable of doing to other human beings, and what their own government has done to them.
Frontline workers are at risk not only for having witnessed the frightening damages of the virus directly. Many will be grappling with their own scientific knowledge that the nearly 24,000 death toll in New York State alone, more American lives lost in one month than in 20 years of the Vietnam War, and the over 30 million lost jobs in the nation that will translate into more hardship, suicides and homicides, almost entirely did not have to be.
Not only that, but society has failed frontline workers through depletion of public infrastructures over decades, where desperation and limited resources became the norm for those trying to provide care through profit-driven hospital systems.
Government Failures
Adding insult to injury, we have a federal government that has failed to stockpile necessary equipment because it is not profitable for big business, and is equally unresponsive to pleas for ventilators and medical supplies, sending governors and mayors on bidding wars with one another. And this is only the proximal cause of the horrors healthcare workers will experience when starved resources compel them to make the ultimate decision of who will live and who will die.
In my 15 years of teaching students at Yale Law School learning to represent political asylum seekers from all regions of the world, I have encountered numerous similar after-effects of trauma. Community leaders and conscientious objectors to oppressive regimes watched family members or compatriots killed before them would come away with survivor guilt and loss of faith in humanity. Their world view is forever altered after having suffered imprisonment, torture, and gang-rape before becoming the “lucky” fraction that escapes to this country. What people find the hardest to cope with is not the suffering itself but the knowledge of what human beings are capable of doing to other human beings, and what their own government has done to them.
It was the same with American veterans of the Iraq War. Law students fought for healthcare benefits that veterans would be deprived of, having been dishonorably discharged for behavior related to the trauma of having to fend for their lives with poor equipment and poor preparation. We realized that a system that causes trauma also does little to care for its aftermath. Through the 2000s, the lack of mental health awareness was staggering, whereby the typical response to veterans suffering from war trauma was to redeploy them to the exact location that caused the trauma as punishment for “complaining”. International and U.S. law includes “humanitarian asylum,” which counts as torture the return of traumatized individuals to their site of trauma. Only when veteran suicides dwarfed war casualties, and it was discovered that those needing the greatest care were being stripped of benefits, did the military reverse its course. And this is for a war that the United Nations found to be criminal.
Fix the System
The best way to honor the losses of frontline workers is to fix the system that caused their sacrifice in the first place.
Like all pandemics, what played the biggest role in the coronavirus pandemic’s scope and severity was not the microbe but the environment—in this case the mental health issues of the nation’s president. Trump’s deep-seated insecurity and pathological envy of Barack Obama led to the dismantling of a global pandemic response system that was lauded throughout the world. Trump’s lack of interest in prevention and public good led to the depletion of funding for great public health institutions such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. His disdain for science and intelligence caused him to reject their warnings for months. And his preoccupation with his self-image and reelection prospects compel him to appear in daily press briefings and place the public in harm’s way, day after day.
This is what has prompted me and thousands of my mental health colleagues to declare from the beginning that Donald Trump in office of the U.S. presidency was a public health emergency. Just as pandemic experts were able to spell out, years ahead of time, what would happen if we did not properly prepare for an infectious disease pandemic, we predicted what would happen if we failed to contain a national mental health crisis. Now responsible for a third of the world’s confirmed coronavirus cases and a quarter of its deaths, while only 1/24 of its population, the U.S. response to the pandemic is only the latest of what we expected from his level of mental capacity.
Little Concern for People
Still, the casualties will not be the worst part—but our learning the truth of what our own government did to us, what it failed to do, and just how little concern it has, even the sadism it has, for its people.
Certainly, Donald Trump is not the only cause. There were underlying broken political, economic and social structures: a mental sickness of society, if you will. But a sickness in society and a sickness in an individual are not mutually exclusive, but reinforcing and synergistic. This is why we have issued our prescription for survival, which recommends the president’s removal, or at least removal of his influence. As health professionals, we are not here to say how it is to be done, but that it must be done as a first step; our societal mental health will greatly improve for it.
President Donald Trump got called out for trying to sow disagreement between New York Democrats.
The president complained Friday morning that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had criticized his administration's still-slow response to the coronavirus outbreak -- and encouraged right-wing bogeyman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to challenge him in the primary.
"Cryin’ Chuck Schumer was on a late night show using a false talking point over & over again," Trump tweeted. "'We don’t have enough testing,' he would repeat, when he knows we have done a great job on Testing, just like we have on Ventilators and everything else. He lied, gave NY SALT. Run AOC!"
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Other social media users busted the president for trying to meddle in Democratic congressional races.
Widely criticized for being woefully unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump and his allies have been offering a variety of excuses — from blaming the government in Mainland China to insisting that no one could have seen a crisis of this magnitude coming to arguing that he was distracted by impeachment earlier this year. But journalists for the Washington Post and The Atlantic, this week, have noted that Trump has found plenty of time to tweet about things other than coronavirus.
On Wednesday, the death toll from coronavirus passed 60,000 in the United States, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. And Philip Rucker (the Post’s White House bureau chief) tweeted a list of things that Trump has tweeted about since that grim milestone — from his poll numbers to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Rucker also noted some of the media figures and organizations Trump has been railing against, including Joe Scarborough and Brian Williams of MSNBC and CNN’s Don Lemon.
Edward-Isaac Dovere, a staff writer for The Atlantic, saw Rucker’s tweet and responded, “The argument voiced by the president, aides and supporters weeks ago was that he was not able to fully focus on preparing for the pandemic because he was distracted by impeachment.”
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@Jolly_Cricketer, responding to Dovere, posted, “Isn’t that sort of admitting he did a bad job?” And @jay_stansbury, responding to Rucker’s list, tweeted, “President Obama must be feeling left out. He’ll probably make today’s line up.”
Nothing angers Andrew Cuomo more than the notion that taxpayers in "red states" should resent or resist assistance for "blue states" struggling against the coronavirus. Hearing that message from Senate Republicans provoked the Democratic New York governor to remind the nation several times of the gross disparity between what his state remits to the Treasury and what their states reclaim in federal benefits.
Cuomo noted acidly that New York pays $116 billion more than it gets back annually, while lucky Kentucky, the home of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, gets $148 billion more than it pays. By that reckoning, New York has kicked in far more over the past few decades than any of the states whose Republican leaders criticize supposed liberal profligacy.
"Give us our money back, Sen. McConnell," roared the New Yorker.
If you add up the excess funds coughed up by the Empire State, it's a lot of money. The enormous disparity between what New York pays and receives is not a new problem. How long has this been going on? The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served from 1977 to 2001, issued an annual report nicknamed "The Fisc" that detailed his state's excess contribution in federal taxes. How much money? Undoubtedly trillions. And that doesn't include interest.
Now, as Cuomo (and Moynihan) would be quick to add, that isn't how we do things in the United States of America. New Yorkers may grumble, as Moynihan did, but they would never demand that Kentucky or Florida or any of the "conservative" freeloading states pay their own way, or that the government should deprive their unfortunate citizens of the federal benefits that make their lives bearable
Certainly, the disadvantaged citizens of Alabama or Mississippi or Tennessee aren't to blame for the demagogic nonsense uttered by Republicans who misrepresent them in Congress, and they don't deserve to be punished either. Indeed, New Yorkers -- and like-minded liberals in California and other wealthy states -- are proud to support food stamps, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all the other efforts to ameliorate the ill effects of Republican social and economic policies.
But the attitude of some Republicans toward their fellow Americans in the blue states has grown noticeably nastier in recent years. New Yorkers still haven't forgotten that appalling moment when GOP senators from states that had gotten billions in hurricane disaster aid turned around and tried to deny that assistance to the Northeast states hit by Hurricane Sandy.
And then came the even worse episode in 2017, when Republicans wrote a tax bill that gave away trillions to wealthy donors while ending the state and local tax deduction, or SALT, that benefits residents of high-tax blue states. Adding injury to all the usual insults, that provision only deepened the inequities of "The Fisc." By the way, the loss of the SALT deduction still makes Cuomo angry.
The phony indignation of Republican senators who balk at assisting the states, cities and towns financially devastated by the virus is as unearned as their perennial denigration of the poor receiving food stamps -- when they know full well that their farmers receive billions in subsidies to stay in business. The issue isn't whether farmers need or deserve aid but whether we recognize that we are one society that must care for all its people, wherever they live and whatever their political allegiances.
To undermine our patriotic and affective bonds across state and regional lines, as those Republicans do, is a dangerous and destructive gambit. Their own ideology of selfishness may someday end up punishing them and their constituents -- especially if the folks in the blue states decide they no longer want to be played for chumps.
What would happen to the beggarly "red states" if all the federal programs were redrawn with formulas that reward each state according to its contribution in taxes? What would happen if the blue states were to decide to secede, as nostalgists in the old Confederacy sometimes threaten to do? What would happen if Democrats were to stop subsidizing ungrateful Republicans?
The answer is simple: Their institutions and infrastructure would fall, and their people would starve.
Nobody should want any such rupture. But the self-righteous red-state politicians should stop yapping about bailouts and remember what the blue states have done for them these past many years. Bless their hearts.
