President Donald Trump is gambling that voters want to see even more of him on television, as his re-election chances dim.
As the campaign enters its final months, the president has wanted to claim the spotlight for himself by reviving his coronavirus briefings, inserting himself into pandemic relief negotiations and accepting the GOP nomination from a dramatic -- but ethically problematic -- location such as the White House or Gettysburg battlefield.
"There seems to be a lot less to these executive actions, not even executive orders, than the White House initially framed," said Associated Press reporter Jonathan Lemire told MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "This was a political move in many ways. This was the president trying to stay on the sidelines for the first few weeks of the negotiations, trying to insert himself in the center of it, to make himself a man of decisive action, breaking through the Washington gridlock."
"It follows the pattern in the stretch run of this year, three months until the election, really betting big on himself," Lemire added. "He's been one who's reluctant to cede the spotlight. He's seen himself as his best press secretary, not just trying to win a news cycle but a moment, and we have seen him now, once again, push himself forward alone for the daily coronavirus task force briefing thinking that is his best opportunity to show a somewhat somber approach to the crisis, as well as replace the fact he can't have any sort of campaign rallies. This is his outlet to address his supporters, soak up media attention. He and his team are betting big on the debates later this fall, thinking that's his best chance to turn around things against Joe bBiden. We have seen him try to promote his convention speech which he is now floating at the White House or Gettysburg, which has drawn condemnation."
The deaths of 18 residents of a New York nursing home highlight the continuing controversy over the Cuomo administration’s decision not to count deaths in hospitals as nursing home deaths. The home denies the allegations.
The nurse with the Columbia County Health Department recorded the COVID-19 deaths at nearby hospitals — two at Albany Medical Center on May 4, another at the same hospital two days later; one at Columbia Memorial Hospital on May 17, and another there two days later — and, along with her boss, concluded there was a pattern.
The people dying at the hospitals had been residents of a local nursing home, the Grand Rehabilitation and Nursing at Barnwell in the tiny town of Valatie, New York. In all, the nurse counted 18 deaths of residents over five weeks. She didn’t have detailed medical records for the patients, but she noted that all had arrived at the hospital with orders saying no extraordinary measures were to be taken to keep them alive. As a result, she and the Columbia County health director developed a theory: “For me,” said Jack Mabb, the health director, “it appeared they were sending people to the hospital so they wouldn’t die in the facility.”
A change in the way New York tabulated nursing home deaths could have incentivized such behavior, he said, making homes’ records on COVID-19 containment appear better than they were.
In the early weeks of the pandemic, the state had counted these deaths by attributing them to the nursing home regardless of where they physically occurred. But in April — as the death toll related to nursing homes mushroomed, hitting as many as 250 deaths a day — that changed: The administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo decided not to count residents who died of COVID-19 in hospitals as nursing home deaths, saying it feared that their deaths would be double-counted if they were recorded that way.
The administration insisted the move wasn’t meant to suppress the numbers at nursing homes, facilities Cuomo had reassured the public were his top priority for protecting from the pandemic. In public testimony this month, Howard Zucker, the state’s health commissioner, defended the decision and argued that New York had been as transparent about nursing home casualties as any state in the nation.
Today, more than 6,500 nursing home residents are known to have perished in New York facilities, some 6% of the state’s nursing home population. The state declined to say how many additional residents died in hospitals after being sickened in nursing homes.
Mabb said that his department’s nurse had sent reports about the deaths of Barnwell residents at local hospitals to state authorities, and that he had asked for an investigation. Some of the residents died soon after arriving at the hospitals, Mabb said, while others took longer to pass away. But the fact that all 18 had do-not-resuscitate orders or similar directives suggested to him that they had been sent to the hospitals with little hope of ever returning to the home. The department, Mabb said, shared its documenting of the deaths with the state.
“There are very few legitimate reasons for a nursing home to send seriously ill residents with do-not-resuscitate orders to a hospital unless there is a real chance that their conditions could be improved,” Mabb said. “We flagged it for the state. We told the Department of Health we thought something big was going on.”
Mabb said the state Health Department, which regulates nursing homes, has yet to tell him if it’s investigating what happened to the Barnwell residents.
Bruce Gendron, a vice president of the company that operates the Barnwell nursing home and 15 others, rejected Mabb’s claims that the home had sought to dump dying residents at local hospitals. He said that residents only would have been sent if they needed care beyond what the home could provide, and that those residents deserved every chance to survive.
Gendron said any scheme to inappropriately send residents to die elsewhere would have involved the home’s medical director and several of its nurses, all of whom are licensed by the state and would have been putting their careers at risk.
Twice in May, state Health Department investigators conducted “complaint surveys” at the Barnwell home after scores of staff members and residents at the home tested positive for COVID-19.
The Department of Health website shows that inspectors found problems with the facility’s ability to contain the virus: Uninfected residents were living alongside infected residents; residents suspected of having COVID-19 also were not separated. Some Barnwell staffers told the Health Department that they were confused about when they were supposed to wear masks and gloves or change out of old equipment and under what circumstances. The inspectors cited the facility and ordered a halt to additional admissions. Dozens of residents were eventually relocated.
Gendron first told ProPublica that the allegations of dumping dying residents at hospitals had been investigated by the state Health Department and found to be unsubstantiated. Asked to produce such a finding, Gendron referred to the inspections done in May, saying the absence of any findings related to hospital transfers proved the home had been cleared. Barnwell’s quality of care related to COVID-19 had become a public controversy in May, prompting coverage in the local media, and Gendron said he assumed the state would have been alert to any other problems at the home, including signs of dumping residents.
The state’s inspection reports make no mention of investigating hospital transfers. The Health Department did not respond to questions from ProPublica about whether it had investigated Mabb’s allegations. ProPublica shared Gendron’s version of events with the state, but again, the Health Department did not respond. Jill Montag, a department spokeswoman, appeared to be unaware of the allegations involving the home’s dying residents, asking ProPublica to send along a record of them.
There is little doubt that Barnwell, a 236-bed facility in the Hudson Valley, was overwhelmed by the virus this spring. From March 30 through the first week of June, according to county statistics, scores of staff members and residents tested positive for the virus.
A tally of COVID-19 cases as of early June shared by the Columbia County Health Department shows the scale of the outbreak at Barnwell. (Columbia County Health Department)
But trying to unpack what exactly unfolded at Barnwell lays bare the confusing and often conflicting available information about COVID-19’s deadly path through the state’s elderly population.
The county Health Department is responsible for identifying cases of COVID-19, and nursing homes are obligated to report such cases to it. But nursing homes are regulated by the state, and the county has a limited ability to make sure such facilities are responsibly reporting and managing outbreaks.
Mabb said he had only received notifications from the Barnwell home on two deaths inside the facility. The state Health Department says online that the death toll from the home is 12. Mabb said he thought the first infection at Barnwell had involved a staff member; the state has said the first case of COVID-19 at the facility involved a resident, but it can’t say with certainty what role if any the resident played in the eventual outbreak.
Mabb said he has ultimately come to mistrust any information coming from either the state or officials with Barnwell. He said he counts the 18 deaths of Barnwell residents at the hospitals as nursing home deaths.
ProPublica contacted the three hospitals where Barnwell residents died, but none would talk about the deaths or the county’s allegation that residents had been sent to them to avoid being recorded as nursing home fatalities.
As Gendron pointed out, decisions to send nursing home residents to the hospital for additional care are supposed to be approved by a home’s medical director. He would not provide copies of such approvals involving the 18 residents who later died at hospitals, however, saying he didn’t have the staff to do such work, and noted that some of the residents had been taken to the hospital after 911 calls, when a medical director’s approval would not have been required.
Sorting out the events at Barnwell, it turns out, also involves another disputed state policy: the order from the Health Department that nursing homes accept medically stable COVID-19 patients being discharged from hospitals. The policy also barred patients from being tested to see if they were still positive for the virus.
The policy, enacted March 25, alarmed and angered many — nursing home operators, families of residents, elected officials worried about an already vulnerable population being subjected to additional possible harm. The state, after a blizzard of criticism, abandoned the order some seven weeks after implementing it.
Last month, the Health Department issued a report asserting that the policy had not significantly contributed to deaths of nursing home residents.
A nursing home in Troy, New York, followed the governor’s order to accept patients being treated for COVID-19. Six weeks later, 18 residents were dead of the disease.
The report was met with open skepticism among nursing home personnel, epidemiologists, and Republican and Democratic officials in New York and Washington. Those lawmakers repeated their calls for a truly independent investigation of the state’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis at its more than 600 nursing homes.
In the Health Department’s report, which said more than 6,400 COVID-19 patients had been sent from hospitals to nursing homes under the policy, the state said the vast majority of the roughly 310 homes that accepted those patients had already had a case of COVID-19 among their staff members or residents. The report said the spread of the virus in the homes had been driven by infected staff members.
But the report made clear that dozens of homes had experienced no cases of COVID-19 before receiving a coronavirus patient from a nearby hospital. ProPublica asked the state to produce the data involving 58 homes that had not been affected prior to taking in a COVID-19 patient.
Days later, the state Health Department said the data in its report had been inaccurate. And several days after that, the department said updated information indicated that just six homes, not 58, had been free of COVID-19 prior to the arrival of a patient from a hospital.
The department would not answer an array of questions about how and why it had changed the data in its report, one it had used to defend its controversial policy. It would not say how what it had called a peer-reviewed study had relied on erroneous or incomplete data; it would not say how the new information had come to light.
It did say, though, that the Barnwell home was one of the facilities that did not have a case of COVID-19 among its staff or residents prior to the first arrival of a COVID-19 patient from a hospital. The state, however, would not say when that transfer occurred or if it had studied what role, if any, it had played in the eventual outbreak that overran the facility. The county recorded Barnwell’s first COVID-19 case on March 30, two weeks before the surge in cases among both staff and residents.
Ron Kim, a Democratic state legislator from Queens, said he has no faith that the state has been honest about what happened as a result of its policy.
Kim, a member of the State Assembly’s Health Committee, said he had taken an intense interest in the state’s efforts to protect nursing home residents. One ZIP code in his Queens district had more nursing home deaths than any other in the state, he said. One of those deaths was a member of his family. Kim said he had filed Freedom of Information requests seeking all administration communications about nursing homes during the pandemic.
“The theme of the report was to shift the blame and scapegoat the workers and the families over the decision that the executive office had made,” Kim said of the Health Department report made public last month. “It’s clear that the executive office is directing and ordering up the report and data collection in a way that will give them what they want out of the report.
“They are trying their best to use government resources and the Department of Health to exonerate the executive office of any wrongdoing,” Kim added.
Kim said given the state’s lack of transparency, it was impossible to say whether what’s alleged to have happened at the Barnwell facility may have been more widespread.
Kim and other lawmakers have said they know of no other state that counts nursing home deaths the way New York currently does.
Informed of Kim’s specific claims, the state Health Department referred ProPublica to public statements made by Zucker, the department’s commissioner.
On Aug. 3, Zucker testified before a joint hearing held by state legislators. He was grilled repeatedly about the state’s seeming inability or unwillingness to answer basic questions about how many nursing home residents might have died to date in the pandemic.
The policy of not counting deaths in hospitals was revisited again and again.
Howard Zucker, the state health commissioner, testifies at a joint hearing held virtually on Aug. 3. (Screenshot via New York State Assembly)
Addressing Zucker in one exchange, State Senate Investigations Committee Chair James Skoufis, a Democrat from the Hudson Valley where Barnwell is located, said: “It’s my opinion that your administration’s definition truly misrepresents the scale of this crisis as a result. So let’s try and get the full picture here and now: How many of New York’s nursing home residents died in hospitals?”
Zucker insisted the state couldn’t say because it didn’t yet have a fully accurate count.
“You don’t have a ballpark that you can give? So the total official number is about 6,500. Are we talking with the hospital deaths: 8,000? 10,000? 15,000? What are we looking at?” Skoufis countered.
“I’m not prepared to give you a specific number. We are in the middle of a pandemic obviously, we always forget about that sometimes,” Zucker said. “We are looking at all the numbers, we are looking at the data, when the data comes in and I have an opportunity to piece through that, then I will be happy to provide that data to you and to the other members of the committee.”
State Senate Health Committee Chairman Gustavo Rivera, a Democrat from the Bronx, suggested a final count wasn’t needed to see what the administration was doing.
“It seems, sir, that in this case you are choosing to define it differently so you can look better,” he said. “That is a problem, bro.”
ProPublica asked the state Health Department if it had ever excluded fatalities of residents transferred to hospitals in counting deaths of nursing homes residents during outbreaks of the flu or other infectious diseases.
The state did not directly respond but said in a statement, “This is a global pandemic, the likes of which we have never seen before. There is no precedent.”
Elaine Healy, acting president of the New York Medical Directors Association, said it shouldn’t be hard for the state to have an accurate count of how many nursing home residents died of COVID-19 in hospitals. They’d counted these deaths in the nursing home totals early on, she said, and “the numbers would be quite easy to get from the hospitals.”
The outbreak at Barnwell was one of two involving local nursing homes in Columbia County.
When the outbreak at Barnwell became public in early May, Patsy Leader, the town supervisor in nearby Kinderhook, called for the state to intervene, accusing Barnwell of trying to cover up the dumping of dying residents. Leader repeated the allegation in a brief interview with ProPublica.
Gendron, the Barnwell executive, eventually traveled to Barnwell to personally handle the crisis.
In a series of interviews and exchanges with ProPublica, Gendron said he was not aware of the state’s claim that Barnwell’s first case of COVID-19 involved a hospital transfer. He said the company had been alarmed by the Cuomo administration’s policy requiring nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients being discharged from hospitals. The chance that such patients could trigger or worsen an outbreak in nursing facilities was real, he said.
“We were very concerned,” Gendron said. “It’s a very contagious virus. And nursing homes provide very hands on care.”
The challenge, he said, was only worsened by the fact that the state’s policy prohibited homes from testing arriving hospital transfers to see if they were still positive and thus possibly contagious. Gendron said he was not even sure if the hospitals were obligated to notify the home that the arriving patient had been treated for COVID-19.
“One would think they should have disclosed that,” Gendron said. “We always believed the best practice was to isolate any COVID residents. But we didn’t even know who was or wasn’t.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is facing as tough of an election challenge as he's seen, but could he actually lose to Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison?
Harrison has broken fundraising records and forced Graham to spend big on attack ads in a race that's virtually tied, according to recent polls, and at least one election forecaster is calling the race a toss-up, reported Politico.
“If Graham’s fortunes are closely tied to Trump’s," said Scott Huffmon, a political scientist at Winthrop University, "then, for Graham to lose, you either have to predict a Trump loss in South Carolina (which would precipitate a Graham loss) or a situation in which Trump wins in South Carolina and many Trump supporters either vote against Graham, or don’t vote in the Senate race."
Trump leads Joe Biden by 6.4 percent in South Carolina, according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll average, which is about half of where he sat in February, before the coronavirus pandemic wrecked the economy and nationwide protests over police brutality heightened the awareness of structural racism.
"I’ve never considered myself a racist, but I have been complicit in it because of my silence,” said Michael Quattlebaum, a Southern Baptist and lifelong Republican who has questioned his political values since the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.
The 51-year-old Quattlebaum wants elected officials to "be angry about this situation," but Graham and President Donald Trump don't appear to care.
“It makes me embarrassed to be a Republican,” Quattlebaum said.
That's why the software consultant is planning to vote for a Democrat for the first time in his life.
“I think Lindsey Graham, to a large degree, has been a talking head for Trump,” Quattlebaum said. “I know in his heart he doesn’t support everything that Trump represents, yet he does it anyway. And I have a problem with that.”
Quattlebaum is not alone among Republicans who are considering a move away from the GOP in the deeply conservative state.
"I’m not going to vote for any Republican who doesn’t disassociate himself or herself from the Trump political school,” said Andy Savage, a Charleston attorney who has reliably donated to Graham's campaigns in the past.
“I just thought he was a really good person," Savage added. "I still think the world of him, I just don’t understand what’s happened to him.”
About a third of South Carolina’s 3.37 million voters are nonwhite, but Graham may not be able to count on votes from the conservative Democrats who usually back him, and Biden's popularity among the state's Black voters could boost Democratic turnout.
“I think this time around they’re probably not [going to vote for Graham],” said Danielle Vinson, professor of politics and international affairs at Furman University. “This time around, they’ve actually got a credible candidate.”
Biden saved his primary campaign and propelled himself into the lead by winning 61 percent of Black voters in South Carolina's influential primary, but Graham's continued loyalty to the deeply unpopular Trump could finally prove his undoing.
“What bothers me about him is his support of Trump,” said Johnny Hagins, a Greenville attorney who served on Graham's finance committee when he ran for president four years ago. “On the other hand, if we want our way about something, it’s good to have him.”
CNN's John Berman on Tuesday roasted President Donald Trump for mangling every single historical fact about the 1918 flu pandemic.
"Overnight, history teachers across America suffered an incredible scare," Berman said. "It came as the president was trying to compare the coronavirus pandemic to the worst flu pandemic of the last century."
He then played a clip from the president's Monday evening news conference.
"The closest thing is in 1917, they say, right?" the president said on Monday. "The great pandemic. It certainly was a terrible thing, where they lost anywhere from 50 to 100 million people. Probably ended the Second World War -- all the soldiers were sick!"
"Can you spot what's wrong with this statement?" Berman asked. "Well, for starters, wrong year, wrong war, and it didn't end it! The great influenza pandemic was 1918, not 1917, despite the president's persistent effort to make it thus. 1918 was the end of World War I, not World War II, which was, you know, a lot later. And neither was ended by the flu."
Berman then sarcastically suggested that the president confused the two wars because they featured battles in "Thighland," a reference to Trump's infamous mispronunciation of Thailand.
A new ad from the Lincoln Project takes President Donald Trump to task for the looming eviction crisis that is facing millions of Americans who cannot afford to pay rent in the wake of the COVID pandemic-induced recession.
"It's moving day for 25 million Americans," the ad states. "Not by choice -- but because the Trump evictions are starting soon."
The ad goes on to accuse Trump of "wrecking" the economy with his negligent handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and then said he wouldn't even support extending the monthly $600 enhanced unemployment benefits that have helped keep families afloat.
"The man in [the White House] doesn't give a damn if you lose yours," the ad concludes. "On November 3rd, remember: It's America or Trump."
President Donald Trump and his allies continue to insist that he has handled the coronavirus pandemic remarkably well, claiming that the death count from COVID-19 would be much higher in the United States if he hadn’t been so proactive and quick to respond to the crisis. But such claims are ludicrous, as Trump seriously downplayed the threat back in January and February and even described it as a Democratic “hoax.” And journalist William Saletan, in an in-depth "blow-by-blow account" for Slate, argues that “tens of thousands” of American lives could have been saved if Trump had done a better job handling the crisis.
“The story the president now tells — that he ‘built the greatest economy in history,’ that China blindsided him by unleashing the virus, and that Trump saved millions of lives by mobilizing America to defeat it — is a lie,” Saletan emphasizes. “Trump collaborated with [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping], concealed the threat, impeded the U.S. government’s response, silenced those who sought to warn the public, and pushed states to take risks that escalated the tragedy. He’s personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.”
Saletan goes on to offer a detailed timeline of Trump’s response to COVID-19. Before the pandemic, Saletan explains, Trump “had multiple warnings — briefings, reports, simulations, intelligence assessments — that a crisis such as this one was likely.” But he ignored those warnings, according to Saletan — and when COVID-19 arrived, he continue to ignore warnings.
“In early January, Trump was warned about a deadly new virus in China,” Saletan notes. “He was also told that the Chinese government was understating the outbreak…. This was inconvenient, because Trump was about to sign a lucrative trade deal with Beijing. ‘We have a great relationship with China right now, so I don’t want to speak badly of anyone,’ Trump told Laura Ingraham in a Fox News interview on January 10.”
Trump has claimed that he was quick to order a ban on travel from Mainland China, but in January, Saletan writes, Trump initially “resisted” such a ban because he was “worried that a travel ban would scare the stock market. But by the end of the month, airlines were halting flights to China anyway. On January 31, Trump gave in.”
Saletan offers elaborate details of all the times Trump downplayed COVID 19’s severity in February and ignored warnings from economic adviser Peter Navarro and Health Secretary Alex Azar.
“Trump didn’t just ignore warnings — he suppressed them,” Saletan recalls. “When Azar briefed him about the virus in January, Trump called him an ‘alarmist’ and told him to stop panicking. When Navarro submitted a memo about the oncoming pandemic, Trump said he shouldn’t have put his words in writing. As the stock market rose in February, Trump discouraged aides from saying anything about the virus that might scare investors.”
In the spring, Saletan notes, Trump’s “most decisive contribution to the death toll was his resistance to public health measures known as ‘mitigation’: social distancing, school and workplace closures, and cancellations of large gatherings.” And in June and July, Saletan adds, “Trump pushed states to reopen businesses even where, under criteria laid out by his health officials, it wasn’t safe to do so.” It was also during the summer that Trump insisted on “holding political rallies,” according to Saletan.
Saletan wraps up his lengthy piece by stressing that throughout the coronavirus crisis, Trump has let the U.S. down repeatedly — although he will never admit it.
“In Trump’s story, the virus is a foreign intrusion, an unpleasant interlude, a stroke of bad luck,” Saletan writes. “But when you stand back and look at the full extent of his role in the catastrophe, it’s amazing how lucky we were. For three years, we survived the most ruthless, reckless, dishonest president in American history. Then our luck ran out.”
President Donald Trump vowed that workers would not have to pay back payroll taxes if he is re-elected, prompting advisers to downplay his comments amid concerns that such a move could defund Social Security and Medicare.
One of the orders targets the payroll tax, the 12.4% tax split evenly between employers and employees which funds the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. The order would allow workers to defer their payroll tax payments through the end of the year, but those taxes would still need to be paid back by April 15.
Trump responded to skepticism about the impact of the move by telling voters that he would make make the cut "permanent" — but only if he's re-elected.
"If I'm victorious on Nov. 3, I plan to forgive these taxes and make permanent cuts to the payroll tax," Trump said during a news conference from his Bedminster, N.J. golf club on Saturday. "I'm going to make them all permanent. In other words, I'll extend beyond the end of the year and terminate the tax, and so we'll see what happens."
Advocacy groups decried Trump's vow over the weekend.
"Social Security is more crucial than ever as Americans face the one-two punch of the coronavirus's health and economic consequences," Nancy LeMond, the executive vice president of the AARP, said in statement. "But this approach exacerbates people's already-heightened fears and concerns about their financial and retirement security."
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden said Trump's vow threatened to "undermine the entire financial footing of Social Security."
"He is laying out his road map to cutting Social Security," he added.
Aside from endangering Social Security, economists believe the move would do little to help those who need it.
"Even if people were to see a bigger paycheck in a number of weeks, the underlying policy is really poor policy," Chye-Ching Huang, the senior director of economic policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told The Washington Post. "The people who would be seeing the biggest increase in their paychecks still have jobs, still have earnings . . . People who lost jobs or retired or get income from other sources would see no help from this."
Trump advisers rushed to clean up the president's comments on Sunday, insisting that the move would not impact Social Security.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who according to The New York Times was reluctant about the payroll tax suspension, said the funds would be reimbursed from the Treasury general fund.
"The president in no way wants to harm those trust funds, so they'd be reimbursed just as they always have in the past when we've done these types of things," he told Fox News.
But Mnuchin also said that if Trump gets re-elected, he would "push through legislation to forgive that so, in essence, it will turn into a payroll tax cut."
Top White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow, who pushed for the payroll tax suspension, claimed to CNN that Trump "will protect Social Security and Medicare" and wrongly insisted that he did not vow to permanently cut the payroll tax.
"When he referred to 'permanent,' I think what he was saying is that the deferral of the payroll tax to the end of the year will be made permanent," Kudlow said. "It will be forgiven. The tax is not going to go away."
"That isn't what the president said at all," host Dana Bash responded. "He said the opposite."
President Donald Trump on Monday told reporters that children are "virtually immune," don't transport or transfer the coronavirus, and just a "tiny fraction" of those who become infected die. Most of that is false, and dangerously so.
"They get better very quickly," Trump continued. "But, as you know, the seriousness of it and what it leads to is extraordinarily small."
Asked if he still believes children are essentially immune, as he falsely stated just five days ago, the President replied, "Yeah. I think that for the most part they do very well. They don't get very sick, they don't catch it easily, and according to the people that I've spoken to they don't transport or transfer it to other people, or certainly not very easily."
That's false.
97,000 children across a two-week period tested positive for the coronavirus at the end of July. And while the fatality rate is lower among children, there are other diseases they (and adults) can get. Among children, "a rare but severe condition that has been reported approximately 2–4 weeks after the onset of COVID-19 in children and adolescents," Associated Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome (AMIS), has been reported, the CDC said on its website last week.
In a surprising split decision, a three-judge panel led by Trump appointee Neomi Rao ruled in Flynn's favor. However, the appellate court chose to rehear the case "en banc" before its full panel of judges: the three judges from the initial ruling, plus their seven colleagues. Of the 10 judges, seven were appointed by Democratic presidents and three by Republicans.
The hearings, scheduled to begin Tuesday, will determine the course of action available to Sullivan. Experts have laid out essentially three possibilities. Will the judges side with the Justice Department and dismiss the case outright? Will they kick the case back to Sullivan given Flynn could still appeal his decision through other channels? Or will the court reassign the matter to a different judge should it decide that Sullivan can no longer rule on the contentious case with impartiality?
"The court has asked the parties to focus on the issue of whether there is any other adequate remedy besides a writ of mandamus," former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade told Salon, referencing the initial order handed down to Sullivan by the three-judge panel.
Mandamus is "a rare last resort," McQuade, who argued that Flynn still has "a perfectly adequate remedy" through appeal, said.
"Unless Flynn or DOJ can explain why that route is inadequate, I would fully expect the en banc court to deny the writ of mandamus and send the case back to Judge Sullivan to decide the motion to dismiss," McQuade said.
"The rule requiring 'leave of court' for dismissal is to protect defendants from harassment and the public from corrupt decisions to go easy on powerful people," she added. "I am almost certain the court will deny the writ of mandamus and send the case back to Judge Sullivan."
Though the question at hand is narrow, the case has become about much more than Flynn's fate. Trump and his allies, including Attorney General William Barr, have commandeered the case as a vehicle to counterattack alleged "deep state" officials over accusations that federal agents acted improperly when they investigated counterintelligence threats in 2016.
Further, Flynn's guilty pleas play a central role in the "QAnon" conspiracy theory, which casts the former three-star general — who served under former President Barack Obama — as a martyr, persecuted for his inside knowledge of the previous administration's alleged efforts to undermine Trump.
A number of the QAnon flock even believe Flynn may be "Q" himself, with some adding three "gold star" emojis to their Twitter pages as a nod to the retired general's military rank. Flynn fueled the rumors after Barr moved to dismiss his case, tweeting a July 4 video of himself and a group of family and friends swearing allegiance to Q. Several individuals tagged in the tweet have added the gold stars to their profiles, including twoattorneys.
"There is nothing in the public record to justify this dismissal," McQuade told Salon at the time. "Flynn lied to the FBI about undermining U.S. foreign policy with Russia."
Barr, for his part, told CBS News in May that "people sometimes plead to things that turn out not to be crimes."
Mary Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, is an extraordinary account from the perspective of a family member of the president who happens to have the rare insight of a clinical psychologist. Her conclusions complement and confirm those of thousands of mental health experts who have also come forth about a U.S. president in historically unprecedented ways. Dr. John Zinner, one of those psychiatrists, is also a leading psychoanalyst and clinical professor at the George Washington University School of Medicine, who previously served in the U.S. Public Health Service and as the former head of the Unit on Family Therapy Studies at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
Lee: You researched and published about severe narcissistic disorders at the NIMH and identified these traits in the president from the start. What are their most important features, and which descriptions did you find most salient in Dr. Mary Trump’s accounts?
Zinner: At the present time, we in the United States are experiencing an unspeakable tragedy. More than 165,000 of us have died in the past six months, countless numbers of us are or have been ill, tens of millions are unemployed, millions are in danger of becoming homeless. We are being struck by a “perfect storm,” a combination of a deadly pandemic combined with an utter failure in leadership by the very person who should have been in charge of preventing this terrible national emergency. Donald Trump has failed us because he is, as he has always been, incompetent, and he suffers from extremely severe mental disorders, which render him incapable of attending to any issue beyond his own personal need for adulation.
The mental condition he suffers most from is formally known as a severe instance of “narcissistic personality disorder,” which is well established in the psychiatric literature. The core problem in this disorder is the failure in childhood and beyond to develop an inner sense of worth or self-esteem. This makes one’s worth entirely dependent upon admiration from others. This dependency likely derives from his parents’ valuing the child, Donald, only to the extent that he met their needs, rather than their recognizing his uniqueness, and their being sensitive and responding to his needs for consistent comfort and nurturing.
Trump feels, deep down like a 'loser,' 'failure,' 'weak,' 'dumb,' 'fat,' 'ugly,' 'fake,' and 'crooked.' These self-denigrating pictures of himself, Trump projects onto others whom he transforms into enemies.
As Mary Trump notes, Donald’s father, “Fred was and always had been the ultimate arbiter of his children’s worth.” Donald’s mother, Mary, was, in the author’s view, “the kind of mother who used her children to comfort herself rather than comforting them.” Compounding this parental failing was Mary’s extended absence beginning when Donald was about two and one half, because of illness and her persistent emotional unavailability beyond that. This left Donald in the care of a harsh and non-nurturing father.
As a result of his total dependence upon external affirmation, Donald Trump feels, deep down like a “loser,” failure,” weak,” dumb,” “fat,” “ugly,” “fake,” and “crooked.” These self-denigrating pictures of himself, Trump projects onto others whom he transforms into enemies. Nevertheless, these traits are his own subconscious views of himself, for which he compensates consciously by creating a grandiose image of himself as unique, a “stable genius,” entitled to special treatment and better at everything than anyone else.
You have commented before that we know a remarkable amount about Donald Trump and that you reject the so-called “Goldwater rule,” which has been used to prohibit not only diagnosis but any commentary on a public figure since this presidency. Can you explain your position?
It is not a rule. It is really a principle or a standard, which is very different, because the preamble of the code of ethics of the American Psychiatric Association that establishes the basic guidelines for the ethical canons says that a psychiatrist’s responsibility, “first and foremost,” is to his or her patients and to society and to his colleagues and himself, in that order. It does not include a public figure.
Do you agree with Dr. Trump that Donald Trump is “the world’s most dangerous man”? What could be coming? What are the possibilities we need to be aware of in the coming months?
What makes Donald Trump so dangerous is the brittleness of his sense of worth. Any slight or criticism is experienced as humiliation and degradation. To cope with the resultant hollow and empty feelings, he reacts with what is referred to as narcissistic rage. He is unable to take responsibility for any error, mistake or failing. His default in that situation is to blame others and to attack the perceived source of his humiliation.
These attacks of narcissistic rage can be brutal and destructive, for reasons that are also part of his disturbance. Especially, these include an extreme lack of empathy, compassion, authentic guilt, remorse, or, fundamentally, caring about the other person(s). Donald Trump genuinely cares for no one but himself. He lacks the capacity to feel regret or to avoid the harm he can cause to others. He can derive a sadistic pleasure for the hurt he may create.
What makes Donald Trump so dangerous is the brittleness of his sense of worth... To cope with the resultant hollow and empty feelings, he reacts with what is referred to as narcissistic rage.
These dangerous qualities should not be underestimated. Donald Trump will stop at nothing to secure the adulation he yearns for by fulfilling his grandiose, often delusional, images of himself. He has and is willing to allow the death of countless citizens by COVID-19, rather than admit he has failed to respond and that the scientists, whom he denigrates, knew all along what works best in dealing with the pandemic.
At this point, expect that Donald Trump will do everything he can do to disrupt the coming election so that he would not have to experience what he fears most, that is defeat, to be a “loser.” One of his current tactics is to disable the postal service so that mail-in balloting will be rendered ineffective.
He is currently spending his days watching television and “tweeting,” as another way of venting his rage. Thus, he is both nonfunctioning as well as dysfunctional. The government seems to be presently run by his aides, standing in for the president. Such seems the case in it being Vice President Pence withdrawing federal agents from the streets of Portland.
You were among the first to alert about the magnitude of his dangers by writing a letter to the military. Do you still believe they have a role?
The only definitive way of dealing with the dangers he poses to us seems to be to vote Trump out of office. Meanwhile, we do the best we can in working for his and his enablers’ defeat as well as protecting ourselves from the consequences. We must support the public health initiatives our scientists insist upon, and work in our communities to ensure that these health initiatives are carried out.
Video posted online purports to show a man being carried out of a store in Tucson, Arizona after a loud rant against wearing masks.
"People won't learn, these people won't learn," a man in a blue shirt, shorts and sunglasses is heard saying, to nobody in particular.
"You're a bunch of idiots wearing masks, you know it's not real," he shouted.
"Look at you fools, you got a f*cking doily on your face. You ret*rd, you look like you f*cking got it off your mom's countertop," he continued.
At that point, a much larger man with a mask over his beard approached the anti-mask activist.
"What's going on?" he asked.
"You're a dork, look at you, you giant f*cking dork," the anti-mask activist said as his son restrained him. "Come outside and show me how tough you are."
"I'll beat that f*cking mask off your face," he threatened, as his son physically picked him up and removed him from the store. "F*cking p*ssies, you're all a bunch of p*ssies wearing masks!"
"Goodbye," a woman can be heard shouting off-camera.
The president's 2020 election campaign continues to play defense in Arizona, a once reliably-Republican state.
"President Donald Trump's reelection campaign is looking to shore up support among a specific population of Arizonans: members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," the Arizona Republicreported Monday. "Vice President Mike Pence is coming to Mesa Tuesday to help launch a 'Latter-day Saints for Trump' coalition in what appears to be a late-in-the-game play to win over LDS voters, who tend to vote Republican but hold values that clash with some of the president's."
The church claims over 430,000 members in the state.
"Some of Trump’s most vocal, high-profile critics are both Republican and Mormon, including Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and former Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz," the newspaper reported. "Romney broke ranks with members of his party during Trump's impeachment trial by voting that Trump was guilty of abuse of power charges. He has said that he will not vote for Trump in the 2020 presidential election."
"Flake declined to comment Monday about the Trump campaign's effort to secure support among Mormon Arizona voters. However, Flake has repeatedly cited concerns over what he sees as Trump’s disdain for traditional Republican Party values," the newspaper noted, citing a recent tweet from Flake.
Politico on Monday reported on how Donald Trump may have imperiled his 2020 presidential campaign by failing to reach a deal with Congress on the next round of stimulus.
"After a spring and summer bolstered by cash infusions from the federal government of more than $3 trillion, the U.S. economy may have to sink or swim this fall with a relative trickle of support — presenting a significant threat to President Donald Trump’s standing as he heads into a compressed reelection campaign already trailing in the polls," Politico's Ben White reported.
"Negotiations on another large fiscal aid package remained stalled on Monday, and people close to the talks held no hope of any movement this week — perhaps even for the rest of the month. And economists mostly say Trump’s executive actions announced on Saturday would have limited impact, even if they manage to survive potential legal and operational challenges," the report explained.
Politico noted that households, small businesses and local governments are all running out of money.
"All of this means that absent a fresh breakthrough on another stimulus bill, an economy that cratered by historic proportions in the first half of the year amid the Covid-19 epidemic will have to continue to snap back without much federal help, at least beyond the easy-money policies put in place by the Federal Reserve," Politico explained. "If no deal is reached and with questions looming over Trump’s executive actions, the economy may wind up without more fiscal support just as the recovery from the depths of the Covid-19 collapse appears to be flagging."
