President Donald Trump tried to goad Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu into attacking Joe Biden, but the gambit failed.
Netanyahu refused to agree with Trump that Biden would be unable to strike the same peace deal he helped broker between Israel and Sudan, which was announced on a call from the Oval Office.
Social media users were both amused and appalled.
During the final presidential debate, President Donald Trump claimed that 180 million people would lose their private health insurance to socialized medicine if the Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, is elected president.
“They have 180 million people, families under what he wants to do, which will basically be socialized medicine — you won’t even have a choice — they want to terminate 180 million plans,” said Trump.
Trump has repeated this claim throughout the week, and we thought the linkage of Biden’s proposed health care plan with socialism was something we needed to check out. Especially since Biden opposed “Medicare for All,” the proposal by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that would have created a single-payer health system run completely by the federal government, and has long been attacked by Republicans as “socialist.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to our request asking where the evidence for this claim came from. Experts called it a distortion of Biden’s plan.
Where the Number Comes From
Experts agreed the number of people who have private health insurance either through an employer-sponsored plan or purchased on the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplace is around 180 million people.
KFF, a nonpartisan health policy organization, estimated in 2018 that about 157 million Americans had health insurance through their employer, while almost 20 million had insurance they purchased for themselves. Together, that adds up to about 177 million with private health insurance. (KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF.)
What Does Biden Support?
Biden supports expanding the ACA through several measures, including a public option. Under his plan, this public option would be a health insurance plan run by the federal government that would be offered alongside other private health insurance plans on the insurance marketplace.
“The marketplace is made up of multiple insurers in areas,” said Linda Blumberg, a health policy fellow at the Urban Institute. “Sometimes there are five or more [plans]; sometimes there is only one. Biden is talking about adding a public option in the marketplace. You could pick between these private insurers or you could pick the public option.”
Getting rid of the so-called employer firewall is also part of Biden’s proposal.
This firewall was implemented during the rollout of the ACA. It was designed to maintain balance in the insurance risk pools by preventing too many healthy people who have work-based coverage from opting instead to move to a marketplace plan. And it all came down to who qualified for the subsidies that made these plans more affordable.
Currently, those who are offered a health insurance plan through their employer that meets certain minimum federal standards aren’t eligible to receive these subsidies, which come in the form of tax credits. But that leaves many low-income workers with health care plans that aren’t as affordable or comprehensive as marketplace plans.
Biden’s plan would eliminate that firewall, meaning anyone could choose to get health insurance either through their employer or through the marketplace. That’s where many Republicans argue that we could start to see leakage from private health insurance plans to the public option.
“The problem is healthy people leaving employer plans,” said Joseph Antos, a scholar in health care at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. That could mean the entire workplace plan’s premiums would go up. “You could easily imagine a plan where it spirals, the premiums go up, and then even more people start leaving the plans to go to the public option.”
Blumberg, though, said that because the marketplace would still include private health insurance plans alongside the public option, it doesn’t mean everyone who chooses to leave their employer plan would go straight to the public option.
She has done estimates based on a plan similar to the one Biden is proposing. She estimates that only about 10% to 12% of Americans would choose to leave their employer-sponsored plans, which translates to about 15 million to 18 million Americans.
KFF also did an estimate and found that 12.3 million people with employer coverage could save money by buying on the exchange under the Biden plan.
But “it’s not clear all of those people would choose to leave their employer coverage, though, as there are other reasons besides costs that people might want to have job-based insurance,” Cynthia Cox, vice president and director of the program on the ACA at KFF, wrote in an email.
Either way, none of the estimates are anywhere close to the 180 million that Trump claimed.
Is This Type of Public Option Socialism?
Overall, experts said no, what Biden supports isn’t socialized medicine.
“Socialized medicine means that the government runs hospitals and employs doctors, and that is not part of Biden’s plan,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, wrote in an email. “Under Biden’s plans, doctors and hospitals would remain in the private sector just like they are today.”
However, Antos said that, in his view, the definition of socialism can really vary when it comes to health care.
“I would argue in one sense, we would already have socialized medicine. We have massive federal subsidies for everybody, so in that sense, we’re already there,” said Antos. “But, if socialized medicine means the government is going to dictate how doctors practice or how health care is delivered, we are obviously not in that situation. I don’t think the Biden plan would lead you that way.”
And in the end, Antos said, invoking socialism is a scare tactic that politicians have been using for years.
“It’s just a political slur,” said Antos. “It’s meant to inflame the emotions of those who will vote for Trump and meant to annoy the people who will vote for Biden.”
Our Ruling
Trump said 180 million people would lose their private health insurance plans to socialized medicine under Biden.
While about 180 million people do have private health insurance, there is no evidence that all of them would lose their private plans if Biden were elected president.
Biden supports implementing a public option on the health insurance marketplace. It would exist alongside private health insurance plans, and Americans would have the option to buy either the private plan or the public plan. While estimates show that a number of Americans would likely leave their employer-sponsored coverage for the public plan, they would be doing that by choice and the estimates are nowhere near Trump’s 180 million figure.
Experts also agree that the public option is not socialized medicine, and it’s ridiculous to conflate Biden’s plan with Medicare for All.
We rate this claim Pants on Fire.
Subscribe to KHN's free Morning Briefing.
But Trump may have peaked a little early with his petulant interview with "60 Minutes" reporter Lesley Stahl on Wednesday and lost his mojo. He was so upset with Stahl's questions that he suddenly ended the interview and flounced out of the room like a sullen teenager. The next day he followed through on his threat to release a White House recording of the interview, reportedly made for archival purposes. Trump described Stahl's interview as a "vicious attempted 'takeout'" and offered this summary on Twitter: "Watch her constant interruptions & anger. Compare my full, flowing and 'magnificently brilliant' answers to their 'Q's'."
Since Trump apparently thought he'd done a great job with that dumpster fire of a first debate perhaps he thought releasing this interview would show him in the same light. It did. But it wasn't a good one.
After having insulted the moderator, Kristen Welker of MSNBC, in the days leading up to the final debate, it looked like he was gearing up for another showdown. But by the time he got to Nashville for the debate at Belmont University, he frankly seemed to be somewhat spent.
It's hard to know if all this was intentional as a sort of "tease" for the main event or if Trump just ran out of gas, but this debate was more or less civilized, at least in terms of his general demeanor. He was dour and hostile, of course, but he didn't interrupt too much and generally followed the rules. (Naturally this meant that observers on Twitter and elsewhere complimented him for his "discipline.")
The problem this time wasn't that his feral personality was on display. The problem was that when you actually got to hear the two candidates answer questions about policy without all the theatrics, it's clearer than ever that even after almost four years in office, Donald Trump still has no idea what he is doing. Even in his subdued state, he played his most obnoxious greatest hits without any awareness that they are stale, stupid and offensive.
Biden, on the other hand, was well-informed about policy, answered all the questions directly and showed himself to be a normal human being. After what we've been through with Trump, those banal qualities almost have a magical feeling to them.
As always, Trump lied extravagantly. As CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale put it:
Trump was, as usual, a serial liar. For a fact-checker, you're kind of sitting there with Biden. Occasionally you're like, "Oh, that's wrong." With Trump, you're like the "I Love Lucy" episode in the chocolate factory. You don't know which one to pick up because there's just so much.
Trump continues to "downplay" the pandemic and that couldn't be more objectionable than it is right now, as we face a surge in cases that may end being worse than the original surge last spring. He went into his usual litany of BS about closing the borders to China and the supposed 2 million deaths that he prevented by doing what he did. He claimed that Biden was itching to shut down the country, to which Biden retorted, "Shut down the virus, not the country."
Needless to say, Trump tried to get the phony Hunter Biden scandal into the debate since that was the real reason he even bothered to show up. He wasn't successful. None of it was intelligible and it all no doubt sounded like gobbledygook to anyone who isn't steeped in Breitbart-esque arcana. (And yes, it's exasperating for the most corrupt president in history to lob such accusations at anyone else.)
When he absurdly accused Biden of taking half a billion dollars from China as vice president, the exchange that followed perfectly illustrated the difference between the two men. Here's Biden:
My response is, look, there's a reason why he's bringing up all this malarkey. There's a reason for it. He doesn't want to talk about the substantive issues. It's not about his family and my family. It's about your family, and your family's hurting badly. If you're a middle-class family, you're getting hurt badly right now. You're sitting at the kitchen table this morning deciding, "Well, we can't get new tires. They're bald, because we have to wait another month or so." Or, "Are we going to be able to pay the mortgage?" Or, "Who's going to tell her she can't go back to community college?" They're the decisions you're making, and the middle-class families like I grew up in Scranton and Claymont, they're in trouble. We should be talking about your families, but that's the last thing he wants to talk about.
Trump's tone-deaf response?
That's a typical political statement. "Let's get off this China thing" and then he looks, "The family around the table, everything." Just a typical politician when I see that. I'm not a typical politician. That's why I got elected. "Let's get off the subject of China." "Let's talk about sitting around the table."Come on, Joe. You could do better.
Trump's smug cluelessness about the concerns of everyday people came through again in the discussion of race, when he once again insisted that the had "done more for African Americans than anyone since Abraham Lincoln," adding that "there is no one in this room less racist than I am." (Moderator Kristen Welker is Black.)
Trump preened about passing prison reform and blasted Joe Biden for a "super-predator" comment he never made — that was Hillary Clinton — and for supporting the now-infamous 1994 crime bill. This, coming from the man who took out that odious full-page newspaper ad demanding the death penalty for the Central Park Five, is bad enough. But as Biden pointed out, Trump's been a big fan of putting more people in prison for a long time. This comes from "The America We Deserve," Trump's manifesto for his short-lived Reform Party presidential campaign in 2000:
We need to rethink prisons and punishment. The next time you hear someone saying there are too many people in prison, ask them how many thugs they're willing to relocate to their neighborhood. The answer: None.
President Law and Order can't have it both ways.
All in all, this was a fairly mundane affair by Trump standards. He managed to keep from turning it into a complete circus. But it may have actually hurt him with the voters. Instead of being shocked and appalled by the spectacle, they actually got to hear what he was saying. And that's much, much worse.
He seemed to realize that once it was over:
President Donald Trump failed his final chance to show voters that he cares about them at all, according to one conservative.
David Frum, the former George W. Bush speechwriter, wrote a new column for The Atlantic showing how the president was unable to win back voters who have drifted away from him since his 2016 election.
"Trump does not do empathy," Frum wrote. "Even Trump supporters know that by now. Some of them may appreciate it. They prefer anger. But those supporters might consider: Trump showed on that stage why he has so often failed at the job of being president."
"He rejected reality (that he’s losing because of COVID-19) in favor of a fantasy (that he’d win if only he could tell more people about these latest allegations from Rudy Giuliani)," Frum added. "He refused to care about what voters care about — and instead insisted that voters care about what he cares about."
Trump was better behaved in this debate than the first, Frum wrote, but he still came across as bizarrely fixated on himself.
"He could never, ever manage even the appearance of care and concern for anybody else," Frum wrote. "Trump erupted in sneering sarcasm when Joe Biden summoned the image of middle-class families at the kitchen table. The very idea of it irked Trump."
In the second and final one-on-one presidential debate of the 2020 race, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden both turned in stronger performances than they had in their first, thanks in part to the impressive moderation of NBC News reporter Kristen Welker. Trump, perhaps because of new rules and advice he'd received, was much less inclined to interrupt Biden and marginally less combative. Biden, perhaps because he wasn't interrupted constantly, was able to get to many of his key talking point and directly connect with voters on matters that are important to them.
Though Trump occasionally had a strong or persuasive moment, Biden was undoubtedly the clear victor of the debate. He cleaned the president's clock.
That claim is not a mere reflection of personal taste, but a judgment about how each candidate talked about issues that matter to people. Over and over, Biden made substantive points about public policy, taking the overwhelmingly popular side in these disputes. Trump would often simply flail in response or back himself into a corner with an unpopular stance.
For instance, on the minimum wage, Trump clearly opposed raising it as Biden has proposed, saying "that's not helping." He said it should be a "state option."
This is a problem for Trump. Pew Research has found that 67 percent of Americans support raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, including 43 percent of Republicans. His stance also undercuts the appeal he had for many GOP voter in 2016, based around his image as an unorthodox Republican who actually cared about working men and women.
Trump also said he wanted the Supreme Court to get rid of Obamacare, a view opposed by 58 percent of Americans, including 66 percent of independents, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Trump says he wants to replace Obamacare with a new law, but he hasn't presented one in four years. And according to Gallup, voters trust Biden more on health care by a 13-point margin.
On a related issue, the coronavirus pandemic, Trump was likewise walking on thin ice. His approval rating on handling of the crisis is under water, with around 40 percent of Americans approving of his response and around 58 percent disapproving. But Trump did little to change anyone's mind on the matter and continued to insist that it's not that big a deal. At one point he, said Americans are "learning to live with it," an opening Biden dove into with a brutal rejoinder:
And when Biden pushed Trump on not taking responsibility for his own performance on the pandemic, Trump gave a response that would have seemed too absurd for parody:
And Biden pointed out that Trump has yet to get another bill passed for COVID relief, another overwhelmingly popular idea. When Trump blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the delay, Biden rightly pointed out that the House had already passed the massive HEROES Act, and Senate Republicans oppose it. Trump trotted out his usual attack on HEROES, calling it a bailout for blue states. But Biden used this opportunity to call for uniting the country rather than dividing, a point that is likely to be more popular than Trump blaming Democrats for wanting too much stimulus money.
Biden also expertly used a discussion of immigration to call out the Trump administration's horrendous immigration policies, which have been highlighted in recent days with reports that more than 500 children who were separated from their parents by the president's agencies have yet to be reunited years later. Biden called the policy "criminal" and spoke passionately about the abuse the children suffered. Here, too, Biden was on strong ground — 66 percent of people opposed Trump's family separation policy, according to one poll. Biden also defended more humane practices of releasing undocumented migrants while they await hearings.
And when Trump hit back at Biden, his answers were inconsistent and hazy. He repeatedly asked Biden who built the cages that Trump infamously put children in, correctly implying that they were constructed under the Obama administration. But though this is a popular right-wing gotcha line, it's hard to see it being persuasive with voters. People who are unsettled by the inhumane treatment of migrants are unlikely to be convinced by this claim that Biden would be more harsh on immigrants. And it's hard to understand the point Trump was trying to make with it, given that his other argument was that Biden and Obama were too lenient with immigrants. Without a clear point to make, Trump just comes off as argumentative and a bully.
The exchange also led Trump into one of the most despicable lines of the night, when he attacked the immigrants who show up for trial dates as having low IQs:
Later, Biden excelled when he talked about investing and green energy to combat climate change. He focused on the fact that these investments can support new jobs and that both labor groups and environmental organizations support his plan. Trump tried to fearmonger about the threat reducing reliance on fossil fuels poses to American industry, but the fact is that most Americans are concerned about climate change and want politicians to take strong action to counter it. Talking about the transition away from fossil fuels is a positive, enthusiastic way as Biden did makes for a powerful message on this point.
Trump's strongest moments came when he was hitting Biden on his support for the 1990s crimes bill, which many now argue was far too punitive. And the president also had a relatively effective line in response to any of Biden's proposals, arguing that Biden never got them done in his decades in government. But he probably overused this attack line and had no substantive response to Biden's point that he has gotten things done but wants to do more, and that he has previously been stymied by GOP opposition.
One part of the debate without a clear "winner" came when the candidates delved into dueling accusations of corruption. Trump fanned the flames of unclear allegations about Biden's son, Hunter, that have taken off in right-wing circles in recent days. Biden hit back by pointing to the New York Times' reporting on Trump's taxes, particularly the fact that it was recently revealed he had a secret Chinese bank account. Arguably, Biden got the better of this dispute, as he focused on the fact that Trump hasn't released his taxes — which Americans want to see — while Trump went off listing a series of fringe allegations that few people outside of the Fox News universe will understand. But even if you argue that this segment of the debate was a "draw" with both candidates coming out looking sullied, that's probably still good for Biden, who is leading in the polls.
After this dispute, Biden pivoted away from the attacks and spoke directly to the American people.
"There's a reason why he's bringing up all this malarkey," Biden said. "It's not about his family and my family. It's about your family. And your family is hurting badly. If you're a middle-class family, you're getting hurt badly right now."
He added: "We should be talking about your families, but that's the last thing he wants to talk about."
It was an effective moment. Trump seemed to realize this, too, because he tried to undercut it with a harsh reply. He dismissed Biden's plea as pure pandering, saying that he sounded like a "politician."
Perhaps that reply was a good one for some viewers. But there's a reason to think it wasn't. Throughout the rest of the debate, Biden was consistently talking about popular policies and ideas that will make families' lives better. Trump was rambling and often dismissing these ideas, while providing few alternatives. So if they were listening to the rest of the debate, many voters will probably think Biden was sincere.
Back thousands of years ago, in February of 2020, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a "moderate" Republican, justified her vote to acquit Donald Trump at his impeachment trial — despite the mountains of evidence of guilt — by claiming that Trump had learned his lesson.
"I believe that the president has learned from this case," Collins told CBS news anchor Norah O'Donnell at the time. "The president has been impeached — that's a pretty big lesson."
That excuse was preposterous at the time, making it sound like Trump was a child who had his hand in the cookie jar, not a 73-year-old man caught abusing his powers of office to blackmail the Ukrainian president into propping up conspiracy theories about Joe Biden. But it was also hilariously predictable that Trump, who is incapable of learning or growing as a person, would absorb any moral lessons from being impeached.
Trump didn't learn anything. In fact, he's only escalated the very same botched conspiracy that got him impeached, only this time around he's abusing his power on the home front, instead of in a distant nation most Americans couldn't find on a map.
Truth told, Trump demonstrated his failure to learn within days of his acquittal, first by bragging about it and then pivoting to lying about the Democrats. Since then, he's gone right back to abusing his power to fabricate lies about his opponent. He and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani — along with Giuliani's buddy Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator with ties to Russian intelligence — eventually returned to the very scheme that got Trump impeached in the first place: an attempt to counterfeit evidence that Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son, had somehow dragged his father into a corrupt scheme. It's a claim with literally no evidence to support it, no matter how much Trump and Giuliani repeat the accusation.
On Wednesday evening, Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump has threatened to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray — who, lest we forget, was appointed by Trump after the firing of James Comey — unless Wray announces a phony investigation into Biden that Trump can use as last-minute ammunition in the presidential campaign.
"Trump wants official action similar to the announcement made 11 days before the last presidential election by then-FBI Director James B. Comey," Barrett and Dawsey write, referring to Comey's infamous announcement that "he had reopened an investigation into [Hillary] Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state after potential new evidence had been discovered."
That investigation resulted in no damning information about Clinton, which was entirely predictable. Clinton had been thoroughly investigated for years without a speck of meaningful dirt turned up on her. But that announcement did help turn an election Clinton should have won to Trump's favor: It caused a surge of undecided voters to break for Trump at the last minute, allowing him to win several important swing states by razor-thin margins.
So there's one thing Trump was capable of learning: The value of fake scandals to distract from serious issues, such as his own corruption and incompetence. And he's hoping for a repeat, which is why he's pressuring Wray to pull a Comey against Biden.
But in doing so — and in "considering" whether to fire Wray if he doesn't — Trump is doing the exact same thing that got him impeached: Pressuring a government official to announce a phony investigation into his opponent, and threatening to use the powers of his office to punish that person if they don't comply. This time Trump is targeting a Senate-confirmed official who leads a federal law enforcement agency rather than a foreign leader.
For those who have grown hazy on the details of Trump's impeachment — which is understandable, since there have been dozens, if not hundreds, of Trump-caused crises since then — a quick recap: In the summer of 2019, Trump called the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, and told him that the U.S. would withhold military aid (which had been authorized by Congress) unless Zelensky did Trump "a favor." That favor was to announce an "investigation" into Biden aimed at propping up the convoluted conspiracy theory about Hunter Biden, a Ukrainian gas company and a fired Ukrainian prosecutor that Giuliani and Trump were trying to push into the mainstream media.
Zelensky clearly felt uneasy participating in a scheme to smear an innocent man's reputation, but Ukraine desperately needed the military aid to fight Russian aggression. Luckily for Zelensky, he was spared from this blackmail scheme by a whistleblower and Trump's eventual impeachment for abusing his office.
Now Trump is doing to Wray what he did to Zelensky. The only difference is that Trump's leverage in this case is limited: He can dismiss the FBI director at any time, having already done so once, but that's about it. With Zelensky, Trump's threats carried a lot more weight.
Either way, the basic story is the same: Trump is demanding that a government official abuse his powers and launch a completely phony investigation based on made-up charges, for Trump's political benefit. In fact, Trump has reportedly made similar threats about Attorney General Bill Barr, because the Justice Department's bogus special-counsel investigation of the Russia investigation evidently hasn't turned up anything Trump can use to bolster his conspiracy theories about the Democrats. (If Barr, the most dogged and ruthless of Trump's sycophants, is in trouble, things in the White House are getting really bad.)
There's a word for all this: Blackmail.
Unfortunately, the media coverage about the attacks on Wray (and on Barr) or about the latest ridiculous wrinkles in Rudy Giuliani's harebrained schemes all too often fails to provide the necessary context. It doesn't remind readers that none of this is new, and that in fact all these developments are part of the same conspiracy that got Trump impeached. The Washington Post article on the threats against Wray fails to use the word "impeachment" or to mention that Trump is treating Wray exactly as he treated Zelensky. And although mainstream media has emphasized the most important aspects of Giuliani's efforts to smear Biden — that Giuliani is not credible and is believed by U.S. intelligence to be spreading Russian disinformation — most articles don't explain that Giuliani is still working the same plot that got his celebrity client (quite likely his only client) impeached.
It's as if G. Gordon Liddy kept burglarizing various Democratic offices after the Watergate break-in, but the reporting on his later crimes failed to mention the first one. Our national situation is an ongoing catastrophe, no doubt. But is it really too much to expect journalists to explain that Trump keeps on doing the very thing he was impeached for doing?
Either way, the situation shows that Trump, despite all his chaotic crazy-uncle ranting, doesn't actually have a lot of tricks in his bag. The only thing he knows how to do is cheat — and the only way he knows how to cheat is by threatening and blackmailing other people to do the work for him. Without that, he's got nothing.
Fox News personality Laura Ingraham tried to attack "liberal governors" with a photo of a vacant Washington Dulles International Airport check-in counter.
The problem for Ingraham became clear once the photo was expanded to show Lufthansa, a German airline company next to another check-in for Austrian Airlines.
Most of the rest of the world isn't allowing travelers from the United States into their countries because the coronavirus is far more widespread.
In June, one man posted a video of himself at the Miami Airport in the International Terminal where he too was the only one around. By Ingraham's logic, Gov. Ron DeSantis is just as bad as Virginia's Democratic governor.
Ingraham was hilariously ridiculed for the self-own by those saying she looked like a "dumba*s."
See the responses in the tweets below:
What is the role of media when the president of the United States promulgates falsehoods, sows division among the populace, demonizes duly-elected officials who disagree with him, gives a wink and a nod to armed White supremacists by telling them to “stand back and stand by,” but orders heavily-armed police to use tear-gas on non-violent Black Lives Matter demonstrators, marching to put an end to police brutality? How do media outlets cover a president who denigrates and dehumanizes whole sectors of the American public every time he speaks? That is, Muslims, Mexicans, women, immigrants, Democrats, “blue” states, Obama, Hillary, Kamala, and Biden…. We must not negate the psychological consequences.
In 1994, there was a terrible slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda. Hutus were given machetes and encouraged to rise up and murder their Tutsi neighbors because it was rumored that a member of the Tutsi tribe had caused the death of the country’s leader. This false allegation was purposely spread by a Hutu-favoring radio station. The massacre of Tutsis and moderate Hutus went on for three months with lasting physical and emotional trauma to the entire population.
That can’t happen here, we say, and we hope we’re right. But the elements that were present in Rwanda prior to the massacre exist here, right now:
All that are needed now are the denigration and dehumanization of the “other” group, which has begun, and a precipitating event or rumor that is to be used as a rationale for attack.
It can already be argued that U.S. media played a role in the election of Donald Trump. In the run-up to the election on November 8, 2016, the major television networks afforded the candidate more than 2 billion dollars’ worth of free airtime. The CEO of CBS at the time, Les Moonves, said of Donald Trump’s candidacy: “It may not be good for America but it’s damn good for CBS…. The money’s rolling in.”
Four years later, we have a president who has told his followers: “the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” When asked about the peaceful transition of power should his opponent win the election he stated: “There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”
Donald Trump lives in a mental world where getting what he wants is all that matters, all that should and will matter, according to him. He cannot tolerate anything other than a world where he “wins”, and hence he will make that happen if it does not exist. He indirectly communicates this to his followers, the implication being that they must mobilize if the official decision conflicts with his world view. He binds, tests, and conditions them to an absolute loyalty, so that they would not accept any other result, even if that means giving their lives to it. This is what is happening when they pack into his rallies without masks or social distancing and accept that the election will be rigged, the news is fake, and they should be “tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots” but “not be afraid of Covid.”
So far, Donald Trump has been careful not to give direct orders to his followers, but from his position of power he does not have to. Henry II did not have to lift a finger to have his followers assassinate the Archbishop of Canterbury. All he said was: “What miserable … traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk!” The interrupted plots to kidnap and kill the governors of Michigan and Virginia, as well as the mayor of Wichita, are the exact effects we would expect he would have when he tweets, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” or shouts, “Get your governor to open up your state…. And get your schools open… Lock ’em all up.” He has also given his tacit approval of vigilante violence.
So what is the role of media in a society where the chief executive is sowing division and inciting violence by denigrating and dehumanizing whole swaths of American citizens, labeling them “enemies,” and protecting Second-Amendment rights to bear arms but not protecting Constitutional rights of peaceful assembly to redress grievances? How can the public remain safe, when peaceful protestors are called “terrorists” by a media outlet that has been set up to promote the values of the White, mostly male corporate ruling class? What can the public do to counter the rising violence and chaos?
The time between November 3, 2020 and January 20, 2021, may be the most dangerous for America. At what point should Twitter disable Trump’s account? When do more responsible media organizations refuse to air his comments or alert their audiences in real time that what they are hearing is false? When do the owners of large venues refuse to give the president access because his rallies spawn violence?
When should the radio station have been shut down in Rwanda, and who should have shut it down?
In America, the people own the airwaves. They are part of “the commons” as stipulated by Congressional legislation in the last century. With the Supreme Court decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” may not fall under the protection of free speech. We now have much better research on how rhetoric from an influential position directly leads to widespread epidemics of violence. This is why the World Mental Health Coalition issued its “Prescription for Survival” earlier this year. We do not have to give our airwaves to someone who means us harm. We can shut him down.
Madeline Taylor, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles and a member of the World Mental Health Coalition, of which Lee is president. They will be holding a special online conference, “Donald Trump's Great Harm to America and the World,” on Saturday, October 24, 2020.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Christopher Wray announced on Wednesday in a last-minute press briefing that both Iran and Russia have obtained voter registration information and have "taken specific actions to influence public opinion."
In particular, Ratcliffe said that Iran has been found to have sent "spoofed emails designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest, and damage President Trump." He seemed to be referring to an incident described in a Washington Post story published right before the conference, which said the U.S. has concluded that Iran had sent emails pretending to be from the right-wing group the Proud Boys to Democratic voters.
The Post explained:
The messages appeared to target Democrats using data from digital databases known as "voter files," some of which are commercially available. They told recipients the Proud Boys were "in possession of all your information" and instructed voters to change their party registration and cast their ballots for Trump.
It's not exactly clear the intent behind the emails. Ratcliffe, a partisan Republican put in place by President Donald Trump because he wanted a crony leading the intelligence community, seemed to give contradicting explanations. If the emails were intended to intimidate Democratic voters out of voting, that would presumably help Trump. But if the emails were meant as a false flag, designed to make Trump supporters look dangerous, then that would "damage President Trump," as Ratcliffe said. It's hard to see how Iran could have intended both outcomes. It's troubling that his explanation was this unclear, especially since he doesn't have a reputation for independence and credibility. (Ratcliffe and Wray took no questions at the briefing, refusing to give the press any opportunity to clarify their remarks.)
The other aim, though, seems quite plausible — the emails were designed to sow doubt, fear, and confusion about the election and its security. When Wray spoke, he encouraged viewers to trust in the American election system.
"You should be confident that your vote counts," Wray said. "Early, unverified claims to the contrary should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. We encourage everyone to seek election and voting information from reliable sources, namely, your state election officials. And to be thoughtful, careful, and discerning consumers of information online."
He added: "We are not going to tolerate foreign interference in our elections or any criminal activity that threatens the sanctity of your vote or undermines public confidence in the outcome of the election."
Neither Wray nor Ratcliffe mentioned any details about how Russia is interfering in the election or what it might use voter registration data for. It's not clear whether that's because the FBI doesn't have any details about Russian interference or if it is simply unwilling to share them for whatever reason. This, too, is concerning, because the despite Ratcliffe's claim that foreign election interference isn't a "partisan" issue, Trump himself has repeatedly tried to cover up Russia's intervention in 2016 on his behalf. There's no way to be confident that isn't happening now.
But there was another even more glaring omission in the pair's comments. Neither mentioned the fact that Trump — not Russia, Iran, or anyone else — is by far the greatest threat to the credibility of the election. He has been fueling bogus conspiracy theories that the election is going to be "rigged" for months, and he has called mail-in ballots a "hoax." So there was something ridiculous about the press conference emphasizing the threat of foreign election interference, especially as Ratcliffe name-checked the president as authorizing the intelligence community's efforts to protect American democracy.
"The president has instructed me to keep the country informed as appropriate," Ratcliffe said. "We will not tolerate foreign interference in our elections."
Wray's remarks about "early, unverified" claims that votes won't count, and that state election officials are the most reliable sources of information about the process, could be read as an implicit rebuke to the president. Trump has repeatedly contradicted local election officials in trying to spread doubt about the integrity of the vote.
And in urging Americans to be "thoughtful, careful, and discerning consumers of information online," Wray was, essentially, telling them to be the opposite of Trump, who has spread absolutely ridiculous conspiracy theories on Twitter recently. When asked to defend himself at an NBC News town hall, he said simply: "l put it out there, people can decide for themselves."
After all this time, most of us realize that Donald Trump is a Russian asset. Not that he’s a secret mole necessarily or even The Manchurian Candidate, but Vladimir Putin plays him like a balalaika strumming Song of the Volga Boatmen.
No one but the two of them knows with absolute certainty why this is—whether it’s money-related (probably) or something else—but unwittingly or not, the cash-strapped president’s certainly playing the “useful idiot” role so beloved in spy fiction and such TV shows as “Homeland.” Doubtless to Putin’s delight, a second term would see an even more concerted effort on Trump’s part to tear apart the NATO alliance and other vital international coalitions, not to mention a further fracturing of these United States.
What’s more, the intelligence community has made us aware, in no uncertain terms, that Russian cybermeddling in our election is still hammering away at American social media with trolls, bots and fake websites favoring Trump, and that he has been informed that Rudy Giuliani is a primary conduit for made-in-Russia leaks and misinformation about Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Trump waved the allegations aside.
One of Rudy’s main sources is discredited Ukrainian Andriy Derkach, described by the US Treasury department as “an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian intelligence services.” Nonetheless, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post has been publishing this rubbish (to the horror of many in its newsroom) and the primetime marionettes of Fox have pumped and bumped the story like a trumpet, even though the channel’s own news department doubted its veracity.
But this week, what strikes me as particularly in the style of the old Soviet Union are the actions of Dr. Scott Atlas, the neuroradiologist with absolutely no experience in virology, immunology or public health who Trump has plucked from the toxic airwaves of Fox to take over the increasingly moribund coronavirus task force.
As per The Washington Post:
Atlas shot down attempts to expand testing. He openly feuded with other doctors on the coronavirus task force and succeeded in largely sidelining them. He advanced fringe theories, such as that social distancing and mask-wearing were meaningless and would not have changed the course of the virus in several hard-hit areas. And he advocated allowing infections to spread naturally among most of the population while protecting the most vulnerable and those in nursing homes until the United States reaches herd immunity, which experts say would cause excess deaths, according to three current and former senior administration officials.Atlas also cultivated Trump’s affection with his public assertions that the pandemic is nearly over, despite death and infection counts showing otherwise, and his willingness to tell the public that a vaccine could be developed before the Nov. 3 election, despite clear indications of a slower timetable.
Atlas’s ascendancy was apparent during a recent Oval Office meeting. After Trump left the room, Atlas startled other aides by walking behind the Resolute Desk and occupying the president’s personal space to keep the meeting going, according to one senior administration official. Atlas called this account ‘false and laughable.’
Colleagues described Atlas as “ill-informed, manipulative and at times dishonest.” So as I read and listened to these reports, the someone who Atlas’ actions and personality reminded me of the most was a controversial figure from the Soviet Union’s Stalinist era: Trofim Lysenko – a man who, as Sam Kean wrote for The Atlantic a few years ago, “probably killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history.”
Lysenko, a biologist—sort of—rejected the science of genetics in favor of screwy theories that said the environment in which crops are grown was far more important than a plant species’ genetic code. Food could be made to grow in the dead of winter, for example, if you soaked the seeds in cold water.
His nutty ideas were embraced by Soviet officials as properly Marxist. Russia was wracked by famine and death. Collective farms were a failure so Stalin put Lysenko in charge. The pseudoscientist helped make it even worse. Kean notes, “Wheat, rye, potatoes, beets—most everything grown according to Lysenko’s methods died or rotted… Stalin still deserves the bulk of the blame for the famines, which killed at least 7 million people, but Lysenko’s practices prolonged and exacerbated the food shortages. (Deaths from the famines peaked around 1932 to 1933, but four years later, after a 163-fold increase in farmland cultivated using Lysenko’s methods, food production was actually lower than before.)”
Communist China adopted his methods, too—30 million died from starvation.
Russian scientists who dissented from the Lysenko school of humbug wound up denounced and jobless. Many were sent to prison and several were executed. His influence finally waned after the death of Stalin in 1953 although he remained at his job until 1965. Lysenko set back Russian agriculture by at least half a century.
Oddly enough, in Putin’s Russia today, there has been a bit of a revival of interest in Lysenko’s crackpot theories, in part because of an overall distrust in science and expertise. In other words, if Trump and Dr. Scott Atlas are any indication, Lysenko would fit right in at this White House.
Despite having contracted coronavirus himself, Trump still eschews masks and social distancing, attacks the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the FDA, then insults Dr. Anthony Fauci, the pandemic’s trusted voice of reason, as “an idiot” and “a disaster.” He mocks Joe Biden for listening to “the scientists,” says he’s “tired of covid,” of talking about and hearing about the pandemic, poor thing. He’d rather throw mudballs, hurl scurrilous QAnon conspiracy theories, egg on armed extremists and yell at his rallies that he wants to throw Biden in jail on bogus criminal charges – anything to distract and keep from talking about an estimated 225,000 dead Americans by Election Day, 400,000 by year’s end. In fact, according to the CDC, if we count undiagnosed cases and COVID-related sickness and death, the terrible human toll already is closer to 300,000.
COVID-19 is on the rise in forty states. On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, warned Chuck Todd, “The next six-to-12 weeks are going to be the darkest of the entire pandemic. Vaccines will not become available in any meaningful way until early to third quarter of next year. And even then, half of the U.S. population, at this point, is skeptical of even taking the vaccine… people don't know what to believe. And that's one of our huge challenges going forward, is we've got to get the message to the public that reflects the science and reflects reality.”
But the message from Trump and Dr. Atlas remains one of denial. Trump says the disease “is disappearing,” that a vaccine is imminent. And just this past weekend, Atlas tried tweeting that masks are useless, only to have his message rejected by Twitter for misinformation. Although Atlas denies he supports the idea of herd immunity – letting the disease rage through the population until it burns out – he recently endorsed the so-called “Great Barrington Declaration,” a pro-herd immunity document conjured by researchers affiliated with the libertarian American Institute for Economic Research and, as reported by The New York Times opposed by eighty “alarmed and angry” experts believing that “the declaration’s approach would endanger Americans who have underlying conditions that put them at high risk from severe Covid-19—at least one-third of U.S. citizens, by most estimates—and result in perhaps a half-million deaths.”
The bottom line is that Trump suffers from a different virulent disease, a callous indolence complicated by indifference and a lack of compassion, not to be unexpected from a lazy and ignorant man who has never worked an honest day in his life. When the nation fell deathly ill, he failed to do what needed to be done and now embraces Atlas as an expert who reverse engineers the president’s lassitude and apathy and tries to make it look like smart policy. Marc Lipsitch, director of Harvard’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics said it well, telling The Washington Post, “If your goal is to do nothing, then you create a situation in which it looks okay to do nothing [and] you find some experts to make it complicated.”
If you would seek an elected official who seems to know what he’s doing—at least on the pandemic front—look again to New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, who, for all his many faults and infuriating anti-reform efforts, has managed to preside over a largely successful statewide campaign against COVID. (Although as The New Yorker's Nick Paumgarten recently pointed out, "Many of the moves Cuomo made in the earliest days of the pandemic were indicative of a governing style often hampered by political calculation and personal pique.")
Watch his media briefing this past Sunday, when he made a thoughtful presentation on vaccines and what needs to be addressed before successful inoculations can be administered to vast numbers of people. Some have suggested that he would make an excellent pandemic czar in a Biden administration; theoretically, a job he could hold while continuing as governor—much as Fiorello LaGuardia ran the nation’s civil defense during World War II yet remained mayor of New York City.
In Scott Atlas, Donald Trump has found his Dr. Death, a Lysenko-like sidekick to the Superman that the president fantasizes himself to be. Yet in reality, this horrific pandemic turns out to be the Kryptonite that may take away his real and imagined political powers and send him, weakened and alone, back to the dark Bizarro world from whence he came.
President Donald Trump has spent the past year attacking those who wear a mask, even going so far as to bully his own White House staff for wearing a mask, demanding reporters take their masks off and claiming his opponent's mask is too big.
Speaking to a Pennsylvania crowd in September, Trump asked if they kew "a man that likes a mask as much" as former Vice President Joe Biden.
"It gives him a feeling of security," Trump said. "If I was a psychiatrist, I'd say this guy has some big issues."
He continued his attacks at the debate.
“When needed, I wear masks. I don’t wear masks like him,” Trump said of Biden. “Every time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away from them, and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.”
Trump tested positive for COVID-19 two days after the statement.
The Wall Street Journal observed that White House staff rarely wear masks despite an order that they do so and when on Air Force One, it's even less frequent.
“I don’t agree with the statement that if everybody wears a mask, everything disappears," Trump told Fox News host Chris Wallace on July 19.
To make matters worse, Trump's own campaign team doesn't wear masks, despite rules that they do so.
"Facing no threat of enforcement, the Trump campaign has continued to make its own rules on coronavirus protections, said the individuals, who requested anonymity to speak freely," Politico reported in July. "For instance, staff have been told to wear masks outside the office, in case they’re spotted by reporters, but they’ve been instructed that it’s acceptable to remove them in the office, the individuals said, adding that staff also publicly joke about the risk of coronavirus and play down the pandemic’s threat."
His attack on Stahl earned a lot of criticism from those online, one for his anti-mask policies, his lies about the virus and mocking him for obviously having such a tough time in the "60 Minutes" interview that he is already having to do damage control.
Lesley Stahl already had the coronavirus back in May, which is probably why she doesn't feel the need to wear a mask. There are cases of people getting COVID-19 more than once, so it's unclear if Stahl has the antibodies required for fighting the virus but most survivors of the virus do.
See the comments below:
Donald Trump's war on mail-in voting seems, like many of his schemes to steal the election, to be backfiring.
As much as he may publicly deny it, Trump knows he's unpopular and cannot win a free and fair election. So he has determined that the best way to hang onto power is to keep as many Americans from voting as possible. Since nearly the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has been waging war against mail-in ballots, which many millions of Americans are using this year in order to avoid crowded and unsafe polling places.
This article was originally published at Salon
Trump has repeatedly and falsely declared, with the help of Attorney General Bill Barr and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, that such ballots are dangerous and fraudulent. He has threatened to use mail-in ballots as an excuse to reject the results of any election he loses. His postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, has been shamelessly taking measures to slow down delivery of the mail. And the Republicans, under Trump's leadership, have done everything in their power on the state level to keep as many ballots as possible from being cast and counted.
And yet, likely because of the very public nature of Trump's war on voting, the whole scheme seems to be backfiring. Since he isn't even hiding what he's doing, it's been easy for Democrats to communicate the importance of voting early, to protect votes from Trump's machinations, without facing a wall of skepticism from the usual suspects in the media.
The result is a wave of early voting unlike we've ever seen in the United States. As of Tuesday morning, over more than 31 million Americans have cast their ballots, which amounts to at least 20% of the expected vote total for this election. And that's with two weeks to go. Americans, or at least those Americans likely to vote for Democrats, clearly understand that Trump is trying to deny them their right to vote — and they're doing what they can to stop him.
Supporters of democracy secured another win late Monday, when the Supreme Court threw out a Republican challenge to Pennsylvania's decision to extend the deadline for ballots to be received up to three days after Election Day. That temporary measure was put in to deal with the pandemic and the expected surge of people voting by mail for the first time. Pennsylvania is a swing state that was crucial to Trump's Electoral College victory in 2016, so he's especially keen on suppressing Democratic votes in that state.
This is the second fight Republicans have lost in their efforts to prevent people from voting by mail in Pennsylvania. The Trump campaign also sued to keep the state from establishing drop boxes that allow voters to skip the Postal Service — and the slowed-down mail — by handing ballots directly over to election officials. That lawsuit was thrown out earlier this month and voters in the state have started casting ballots at the boxes.
Unfortunately, there's a fly in the ointment, the nature of which was neatly laid out by Ian Millhiser at Vox: Four of the five Republican justices on the Supreme Court, in the face of all law and precedent, were ready to entertain Trump's obviously illegitimate challenge to the Pennsylvania election deadline.
This is terrible, because, as Millhiser points out, election law is determined by the states and "in questions of state law, the state Supreme Court is supposed to be the final word on such disputes."
"Indeed, if state supreme courts cannot interpret their state's own election law, it's unclear how that law is supposed to function," he adds.
In other words, rejecting the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's ruling to uphold the law shouldn't even have been an option. That four Republican justices feel otherwise suggests, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, that there's no legal argument Trump could make that is so preposterous that these four justices would reject it, so long as it serves the end goal of securing Republican power, including a second term for Donald Trump.
Trump has made it clear that he's looking to the Supreme Court to save him from facing the judgment of voters. That four right-wing justices are willing to go along with this, no matter how much doing so violates the plain wording of the law, is terrifying. That's especially true in the face of the Republican rush to seat Amy Coney Barrett on the court before the election, since she's almost certain to be a fifth vote for the principle that Republicans deserve to hold power, law and democracy be damned.
This is why it's not hyperbolic to see the Barrett as the last leg being kicked out from under our fragile democracy, which can only be restored by expanding the Supreme Court, if and when Democrats regain the power to do so. It's hard to imagine democracy surviving if a Supreme Court with six conservative justices gets the ultimate say over elections, and if their guiding principle is that any Democratic victory is illegitimate, regardless of the low-quality, bad-faith arguments presented. The goal of Republicans, under Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, is to make the U.S. a one-party state and shut out any voters who resist that. They are shockingly close to achieving that goal.
It's easy to give into despair, but let's be clear: All is not lost. For one thing, even this corrupt slate of current justices probably wouldn't go so far as to completely vacate the results of an election, simply because Trump wants them to. They'll want to be a bit more subtle about it, using measures like trying to stop vote-counting as early as possible. But if Joe Biden wins the November election in a blowout, as now seems possible, that strategy will become impossible. The fact that so many people are voting early is a good sign — it means vote-counting will be well underway before the Barrett court can rush in to stop it.
In addition, while Barrett's confirmation is looking likely, Democrats haven't given up completely on trying to slow it down or even stop it before the election. Late on Monday, Democrats tried to force a vote to adjourn Senate business until after the election, which would keep Barrett off the court. That move failed, but Senate Democrats have indicated they'll keep trying to use procedural moves to slow Barrett's confirmation down until after the election, which is only two weeks away.
There's no reason to be Pollyanna-ish here. Things are bad. Republicans are doing everything in their power to end democracy and render the right to vote meaningless, and using the courts as their main weapon on that front.
But so far they haven't succeeded, in no small part because the American people are still resisting, the courts haven't completely sold out to anti-democracy ideologues, and Trump himself is as bad at staging a coup as he was at running his business. Moreover, time is running out on the plot to keep people from voting and more votes are being banked every day. There's still a chance to pull our democracy back from the abyss, but it's going to require ordinary people doing everything they can to save it.
This is not Dr. Scott Atlas’ first rodeo.
It might seem like Atlas came out of nowhere after getting recruited by Stephen Miller at a QAnon meeting. Or you might have him confused with the Atlas who tried to kill Superman in #677 of the superhero series.
Atlas wasn’t famous until he got plucked by Trump from the farthest right reaches of the universe as a pandemic adviser carrying the flag for herd immunity. That, of course, is the theory that says, in effect, that saving the economy in an election year is certainly worth losing a few million lives.
But it turns out Atlas has been on the political scene as a foe of government health care for quite a while. As a creature of the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank uneasily affiliated with Stanford University, Atlas has left a bit of a paper trail.
In 2008, for example, Atlas was the presidential campaign health adviser for one Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor--since turned vampire--who was running a crowded Republican-primary field that included Governors Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee and Senator John McCain. Romney’s signature issue was bringing Romneycare, the popular public health-care program he advanced in Massachusetts, to the national scene.
Here’s what Atlas had to say about that:
“Mitt Romney’s legacy is the creation of a multibillion-dollar government health bureaucracy that punishes employers and insists middle income individuals either purchase health insurance or pay for their own health care,” Atlas said to the Associated Press. “The former is a mandate, the latter is a tax, and neither one is free market.”
With Atlas’ assistance, Giuliani finished 8th in a field of 8 that year, the only candidate to stay in the race and receive zero delegates. Romney finished closely behind Huckabee. McCain, of course, won a landslide primary victory, only to lose to President Barack Obama, whose landmark Obamacare was modeled in part after Romneycare.
If that isn’t ironic enough, there’s this: On March 24, 2012, a reinvented Romney proudly announced his team of five healthcare advisers who would help him attack the horrors of the Affordable Care Act. First on the list: Dr. Scott Atlas.
Perhaps that honeymoon didn’t last after Romney went down to defeat in the general election. Atlas, was still snarky about Romneycare in 2014.
Researchers then reported, according to the Boston Globe, “that four years after Romneycare was implemented in 2006, death rates in the state dropped nearly 3 percent among young and middle age adults compared with similar populations in states that didn’t expand coverage.”
Replied Atlas, citing no facts: “I am skeptical that such an immediate and significant drop in mortality would occur after getting health insurance.”
Why, of course you’re skeptical, sir. That’s what has produced descriptions today from the likes of Dr. Robert Redfield, Trump’s director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who said succinctly “everything (Atlas) says is false.”
On the other hand, that doesn’t keep Atlas’ weirdness from rubbing off on others. At a Senate Health Committee hearing in May, Romney posed the following question, according to the St. George News, of Utah:
“Should we let this run its course through the population and not try to test every person?” Romney asked Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “I’m saying that a bit as a strawman, but I’m interested in your perspective.”
His response was unenthusiastic.
“Collins said the result would not be a disaster when it came to much of the population that is not at high risk of dying from the virus,” the paper reported, “but it could be deadly for the elderly and others with health conditions like asthma, diabetes and heart conditions.”
Deadliness is the sort of thing that troubles the likes of Atlas’ 78 medical faculty colleagues at Stanford University, who issued a statement condemning his idiocy.
“Many of his opinions and statements run counter to established science and, by doing so, undermine public health authorities.” For his part, Atlas brandished his Trumpish credentials by threatening those colleagues with a defamation lawsuit for speaking truth.
In response to that lawsuit, attorneys for the Stanford faculty members said, ““If [Atlas] cannot tolerate science-based criticism of his opinions and statements concerning this public health crisis, then he has no business advising anybody, let alone the President of the United States.”
But he is.
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