The White House is sitting on billions of dollars intended to expand coronavirus testing.
Dr. Scott Atlas has consolidated his control over the White House coronavirus task force to the frustration of public health experts and Senate Republicans, and has pushed to allow the potentially deadly virus to spread until the U.S. reaches herd immunity, reported the Washington Post.
"Atlas shot down attempts to expand testing," the Post reported. "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."
Infectious disease experts Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx have urged the White House to expand testing capacity as winter approaches, but Atlas -- a neuroradiologist and Fox News regular -- won't allow it.
"They have urged the government to use unspent money Congress allocated for testing — which amounts to $9 billion, according to a Democratic Senate appropriations aide — so that anyone who needs to can get a test with results returned quickly," the Post reported.
"But Atlas, who is opposed to surveillance testing, has repeatedly quashed these proposals," according to the newspaper. "He has argued that young and healthy people do not need to get tested and that testing resources should be allocated to nursing homes and other vulnerable places, such as prisons and meatpacking plants."
President Donald Trump installed radiologist Dr. Scott Atlas as his top coronavirus expert after seeing him on Fox News. Atlas has attacked the wearing of masks saying they don't work, has blocked the federal government from spending billions in congressionally-approved funds for coronavirus testing, and pushed a quack theory that claims Americans who have had the common cold are somehow protected from the deadly coronavirus.
Although he denies it, Atlas is supporting "herd immunity," claiming far fewer Americans than scientists say need to be infected with coronavirus in order to stop the pandemic.
"Given the transmissibility of the coronavirus, experts estimate about 60 to 70 percent of the population would need to become infected to reach herd immunity, a course that they warn would probably result in hundreds of thousands of excess deaths."
CDC Director Robert Redfield says less than 10% of Americans have been infected with the coronavirus.
"Atlas publicly contradicted Redfield last month, telling reporters that more of the population was protected against the virus because of so-called T-cell immunity, in which people with exposure to previous coronaviruses — such as the common cold — have T cells that also protect them against covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus."
Atlas' claim is false, as the 8 million Americans already infected and the 220,000 who have died prove.
But science isn't Atlas' goal: pushing Trump's goal of completely re-opening the country is Atlas' goal.
"At a task force meeting late last month, Atlas stated that there was herd immunity in much of the country because of a combination of high infection rates in cities such as New York and Miami and T-cell immunity," The Post reports. "He said that only 40 to 50 percent of people need to be infected to reach the threshold. And he argued that because of this immunity, all restrictions should be lifted, schools should be opened and only the most vulnerable populations, such as nursing home residents, should be sheltered."
Atlas has blocked proposals from Birx and Fauci, which called for "dramatically increasing the nation’s testing capacity, especially as experts anticipate a devastating increase in cases this winter. They have urged the government to use unspent money Congress allocated for testing — which amounts to $9 billion, according to a Democratic Senate appropriations aide — so that anyone who needs to can get a test with results returned quickly."
And as was widely reported, Twitter over the weekend removed a tweet Dr. Atlas posted attacking masks, for violating its safety standards and rules about spreading misinformation.
Some reporters inside the New York Post are revolting against their paper's decision to push Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani's purported Hunter Biden emails in the closing weeks of the 2020 election.
"All this Hunter Biden sh*t is being done in its own bubble," the source said. "It's happening on an island within an island."
The source said that his paper's decision to publish Giuliani's smear campaign against the Bidens was "gross," but they said they were hopeful most voters were seeing through it.
"It’s heartbreaking to me as a journalist but makes me happy as a citizen that most people see the grift," they said.
Giuliani admitted over the weekend that his source for getting dirt on Hunter Biden may actually be a Russian spy, and there have been leaks from within the intelligence community that the leaked Biden emails are Russia's attempt to recreate its successful strategy of releasing hacked Clinton campaign emails in the waning weeks of the 2016 presidential race.
Writing in The Atlantic this Monday, Yasmeen Serhan says that President Trump's penchant for personality politics has caused him to find common cause with leaders in whom he shares similarities: "populists and nationalists who share a disregard for norms, a disdain for dissent, and a dedication to strengthening their own power."
While some leaders Trump has cozied up to don't have an extreme history of being adversarial to the U.S., others have. Nevertheless, all have benefited from the friendliness of Trump -- someone who has proved willing to not only turn a blind eye to their abuses but to even applaud them.
Serhan rattles off a list of world leaders with less-than-favorable records that Trump has befriended, one of them being Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. "Like Trump, he has made crude statements about women and minorities, lashed out against experts and 'fake news,' and peddled conspiracy theories," Serhan writes. "He welcomed his association with the American president as the 'Trump of the Tropics' and even adopted his own version of Trump’s 'America First' slogan: 'Brazil above all.'"
Among the most disturbing of Trump's friendships is Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, who enabled thousands of extrajudicial killings as part of his own 'war' on drugs. “I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem,” Trump told Duterte in a 2017 phone call, according to a transcript. “Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that.”
A customer unleashed a racist rant after a Dallas-area shoe store clerk refused to exchange his boots.
The man asked to exchange the pair he bought and became angry after the clerk declined his request, reported WFAA-TV.
”Racial slur after racial slur,” said Yamani Martin, who recorded the outburst. ”I was flabbergasted. I was just -- I can’t believe this man is actually becoming this irate.”
The unidentified white man, who appeared to be in his 50s or 60s, screamed slurs at the store's Black and Latino clerks while bouncing on his feet in an aggressive manner.
"At one point," Martin said, "I asked the 911 operator, are you hearing this, and she replied, yes."
Police responded to the incident just as the man picked up a boot to throw at a worker, and officers issued a criminal trespass warning against him.
Delving into the battle inside the White House task force overseeing the government's response to the coronavirus pandemic, the Washington Post is reporting that Dr. Deborah Birx has grown fed up with Dr. Scott Atlas who is encouraging Donald Trump to let herd immunity resolve the nation's health crisis that has led to almost 220,000 dead Americans.
The report notes that at some meetings Birx and fellow public health official Dr. Anthony Fauci have been excluded and that Atlas -- a radiologist with no experience in epidemiology -- has been holding sway, including sitting at the head of the table.
According to the report, "Discord on the coronavirus task force has worsened since the arrival in late summer of Atlas, whom colleagues said they regard as ill-informed, manipulative and at times dishonest," while noting that Atlas has dismissed out of hand data provided by Birx while pushing what some members on the task force call "junk science."
The report notes that friction came to a head recently which led Birx to confront task force head Mike Pence and demand he dismiss Atlas for doing damage to the government's work on stemming the spread of COVID-19.
"Birx recently confronted Vice President Pence, who chairs the task force, about the acrimony, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Birx, whose profile and influence has eroded considerably since Atlas’s arrival, told Pence’s office that she does not trust Atlas, does not believe he is giving Trump sound advice and wants him removed from the task force, the two people said," the Post reports, before adding Pence suggested she and Atlas come back with data "bolstering their perspectives to the task force and to work out their disagreements themselves."
The report notes that Pence's mismanagement of the conflict and the continuing presence of the controversial Atlas has resulted in "a U.S. response increasingly plagued by distrust, infighting and lethargy, just as experts predict coronavirus cases could surge this winter and deaths could reach 400,000 by year’s end."
President Donald Trump's decision to defy public health experts and hold mass rallies in states where COVID-19 cases are surging is doing the president more harm than good, according to a longtime GOP strategist.
Mark McKinnon, who served as a campaign adviser to both former President George W. Bush and the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), told CNN on Monday that Trump's COVID super-spreader rallies across the country are generating a backlash in communities that have been afflicted by the novel coronavirus.
"The problem with the rallies is that he's going into states, many of which are seeing coronavirus spikes," McKinnon said. "So he's exacerbating the problem that he's got, which as the race has become a referendum on COVID. So he goes to the states and the local coverage, especially, is packing a punch because it's saying Donald Trump is here, COVID is spiking, meanwhile he's holding huge rallies with people who are not socially distancing and many of whom are not wearing masks."
USA Today columnist Kirsten Powers chimed in to say that the president thinks his super-spreader rallies are a winning strategy because he's had his brain locked into the Fox News ecosystem.
"I think Donald Trump always has focused primarily on his very core supporters, right, the people who show up to the rallies," she said. "And so he lives in a bit of an alternative universe, where COVID isn't the biggest problem in the world, and in fact, it's something that the media is exaggerating, and that people are using to harm Donald Trump. Facts be damned, reality be damned."
We’ve conducted extensive research on American farmers in recent years through surveys and one-on-one interviews. We’ve also examined the impact of the U.S.-China trade war.
While the economic costs have been steep, Trump has found a way to make it up to them: record subsidies. And that’s why we believe most U.S. farmers will stay loyal to Trump.
Falling exports
The trade war with China, which began in 2018, has dealt a major blow to U.S. agricultural exports.
After over a year of escalation, by the fall of 2019 retaliatory tariffs by China had covered virtually all U.S. agricultural products. As a result, exports of key goods such as soybeans experienced steep declines, resulting in losses to U.S. soybean farmers of over US$10 billion, according to our calculations.
The pain was spread across the U.S., if unevenly. California’s state economy, for example, has suffered the most, losing over $6 billion. Still, most states saw hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, and 11 experienced losses of more than $1 billion.
Federal subsidies to the rescue
In 2018, the Trump administration created a subsidy program intended to mitigate farmers’ losses related to the trade war. Breaking from tradition, the administration let the U.S. Department of Agriculture spend the money without first getting approval from Congress.
Under the program, farmers and ranchers received $8.5 billion for 2018 losses and $14.3 billion for 2019. No trade-related subsidies have been distributed for 2020 except for the remaining third tranche of the 2019 payments.
But just as some states were hurt more by the trade war than others, not all states benefited equally from the payments. The subsidies heavily targeted the Midwest, reflecting the political influence of rural constituents in these states. Most of the states that came out ahead – such as Iowa and Nebraska – tend to vote Republican and have relatively large agricultural sectors.
As Trump put it during a recent rally in Iowa, “Some of the farmers were making more money the way I was doing it than working their asses off, all right? They were very, very happy.”
Since the costs of the program are financed by all taxpayers, states with large urban populations such as California, Texas and New York are footing the bill – and spending more money than they are getting in support. California farmers, for example, received just $106 million in payments – despite the $6 billion in losses – even as the state’s taxpayers contributed $2 billion to the program.
Coronavirus adds to losses
Unfortunately for farmers, just as the U.S. and China were reaching a truce in their trade war, the coronavirus recession saddled them with another source of deep economic pain.
While the economic toll from the virus remains unknown, the closures of schools, restaurants and other businesses cut into food sales and further depressed markets for crop and livestock farmers across the United States. In 2020, even with federal aid, Midwest corn and soybean farmers are expected to lose money.
Working with Congress this time, the Trump administration created another program to help farmers hurt by the coronavirus pandemic and has so far disbursed almost $30 billion. Again, a large chunk of the payments have gone to red Midwestern states such as Iowa, which alone received almost $1 billion of the first $10.2 billion disbursed.
Payments have been accelerating as Election Day approaches. Combined with trade-related and pre-Trump subsidies, total payments this year are expected to reach a record $46 billion.
While the payments are meant to provide short-term relief, the trade war may already have done long-term damage to American farmers. The tariffs on U.S. agricultural products led Chinese companies to seek out cheaper sources for food and feed. Brazilian farmers sold record amounts of soybeans to China in May and June and are now enjoying their highest profits from the crop in history.
Farm country demonstrates its continuing support for the president.
Yet the generous farmer subsidies are one reason farmers have said they support Trump’s trade war. Last fall, our survey of Midwest crop farmers found that 56% said they somewhat or strongly support Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products, despite retaliation on their own exports. Farmers also said they share concernsheld by many Americans of the broader perceived threat of China over issues like the trade deficit and cyber espionage.
And several recent polls show that farmers’ overall support for the president remains strong. Eighty-two percent of farmers polled by the Farm Journal in August said they planned to vote for Trump. A survey of large-scale farmers in July found that 75% would back the president, about the same as in 2016.
While the trade war’s impact on the election remains unclear, there is no reason to expect a substantial portion of farmers to defect from the president.
After Richard Nixon resigned from office in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the Congress set out to create numerous reforms designed to rein in future presidents. After all, Nixon had set forth a view of the presidency that was downright un-American: "If the president does it it's not illegal," essentially saying that no law can apply to the executive branch.
The legal system had worked, up to a point. Twenty-two members of the Nixon administration were convicted of crimes pertaining to Watergate. Most of them did time in prison, including the White House chief of staff and the attorney general. Nixon himself was guilty of numerous crimes but was never tried for any of them because he was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford. But much of what Nixon did wasn't illegal. It was unethical, immoral and totally disrespectful of any and all norms of decent leadership. It turns out that those kinds of transgressions are even harder to check than rank criminality.
There were committee investigations, such as the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House which delved deeply into the intelligence community's abuses, resulting in the permanent select committees on intelligence in each chamber. Later reforms required the president to inform congressional leaders of both parties prior to major covert actions, and for leaders of the CIA to regularly brief the committees.
Unfortunately, those reforms were of limited utility. The Iran-Contra scandal and the pardons that followed mocked the idea of intelligence oversight. The CIA black sites and torture program program during the George W. Bush administration pretty much destroyed the illusion that Congress had any control over the intelligence services. Throughout this period, the War Powers Act, which was enacted over Nixon's veto in the first place, has been a joke. As for campaign finance and ethics reforms, well, those were nice ideas. The Supreme Court took care of the first with the Citizens United ruling, and the second turns out to be almost entirely dependent on a sense of shame — a thing that turns out to be easily discarded.
And yet, for all of that, no one has come close to abusing the power of the presidency as Donald Trump has done. He didn't do it on his own. Yes, his personal inclination has been to treat the government as his private fiefdom, demanding loyalty oaths, conducting purges and using the office for his personal profit. But people such as Attorney General Bill Barr and others in right-wing legal circles who were politically baptized by Nixon's downfall have used Trump's authoritarian instincts to institute the "imperial presidency" that Nixon once espoused.
When Trump says "I have an Article II that says I can do anything I want," he didn't get that idea from reading the Constitution. He has obviously never done that, and wouldn't understand it anyway. He has been told this by people who believe very strongly in unaccountable presidential power: "If the president does it, it's not illegal." Barr's covering for Trump's obstruction of justice in the Mueller probe, the White House refusal to cooperate with Congress, the assertion of novel rationales that render oversight null and void and the Department of Justice claiming that personal cases against Trump come under the rubric of presidential immunity, among many other instances are not just exercises in Trumpian corruption. They are assertions of executive power way beyond anything that Nixon, Reagan or Bush ever thought of.
That's not Trump. It's a Republican power grab, and it's just one of many we've seen coming from the right in recent years. This authoritarian strain of thought has been with us at least since the Nixon era and it's metastasizing.
I wrote the other day that should the Democrats win the presidency and the Senate they must take the necessary step of expanding the Supreme Court. There has also been considerable discussion about getting rid of the Senate filibuster and granting statehood to Washington, D.C. These ideas and others are starting to make people nervous.
The Washington Post published an essay by Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore this past weekend in which she argues against one of the ideas percolating on the left: that a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" is needed to examine what happened during the Trump administration. This idea stems from the suspicion that the law will not adequately deal with a corrupt former president and his accomplices. I suspect that many people believe that our system is so damaged at this point that Congress will be unable to properly handle the task of unraveling this disaster and putting it right. So something like a truth and reconciliation commission comes into play since that would make it possible for the truth to come out, even if no legal penalties for the abuses that took place are likely or possible. At least we would know.
Lepore doesn't think the situation is grave enough for that. Trump can be dealt with by journalists and historians; Congress will carry on with passing legislation. But as you can see, we've been dealing with this for more than 40 years and it's just getting worse and worse.
Donald Trump has turned 40% of the country into his private cult. The Republican Party has become radical, corrupt and power-mad and America is now seen as a rogue superpower around the world, unpredictable and dangerous. We're being tested by foreign adversaries and we don't seem to be able to respond. The nation's economic situation is dire and nearly a quarter of a million people have died in the last eight months because our system is so broken. The racial injustice at the heart of our society has become too much to bear.
Journalism and history, in Lepore's view, are going to keep us tethered to the truth? There is an entire right-wing information ecosystem based on lies and fantasy. We live in an age where tens of millions of people live in an alternate reality, believing that the Democratic Party is run by a Satanic pedophile cult and that John F. Kennedy Jr. is coming back from the dead to help Donald Trump save the children.
We are in very big trouble.
Our immediate survival depends upon electing new leadership — that much is true. Our democracy is under stress but it may not yet be so damaged that we can't make that happen. But whether it's a truth and reconciliation commission or a "presidential crimes commission" made up of independent prosecutors, as Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., has suggested, or some other mechanism by which we document what has happened and attempt to hold people accountable, we need something. Otherwise I'm afraid we'll just let it all slide out into the ether as if nothing happened at all. Until it happens again.
For more than 40 years the U.S. has been heading down this path, sometimes pushed back by various institutions that were designed in the wake of Watergate to keep it from going too far. But those institutions have been failing for a while and I don't think we can survive another onslaught, especially if someone smarter than Donald Trump comes along and picks up the the tools that Bill Barr and others have provided them. The Democrats must do their duty and deal with this now.
President Donald Trump's campaign is worried that he has rapidly lost ground in North Carolina, which is a state he desperately needs to hold if he wants to win the 2020 election.
ABC News reports that "the Trump campaign is increasingly worried that the president's chances of winning North Carolina, a state the team has heavily invested in and views as essential for Trump's path to victory, has all but evaporated."
One big problem with North Carolina is that, unlike several key Midwestern battlegrounds, it is very likely to have all of its votes counted on election night, which means it could be a "a clear white flag" for the president's re-election hopes.
This is particularly jarring for the president's campaign, which viewed North Carolina as a "super safe" state for him mere weeks ago.
FiveThirtyEight's election forecast currently shows Biden is slightly favored to win North Carolina and has roughly a two-in-three shot at taking the state.
In a column for the Atlantic, a former adviser to Republican President George W. Bush made the charge that evangelical Christians sold their souls to support Donald Trump while he secretly held them in contempt and used them to advance his political ambitions.
Using an article from McKay Coppins who reported, "many of Trump’s comments about religion are marked by cynicism and contempt, according to people who have worked for him. Former aides told me they’ve heard Trump ridicule conservative religious leaders, dismiss various faith groups with cartoonish stereotypes, and deride certain rites and doctrines held sacred by many of the Americans who constitute his base," Peter Wehner stated it's time for Christians who supported the president to reconsider their view of him before they cast their ballots.
"Let’s start with the president," Wehner, who focuses on the role of religion in government, wrote. "A man whose lifestyle is more closely aligned with hedonism than with Christianity, Trump clearly sees white evangelicals as a means to an end, people to be used, suckers to be played. He had absolutely no interest in evangelicals before his entry into politics and he will have absolutely no interest in them after his exit."
Conceding that extremely conservative Christians have made some "transactional' gains under the president -- in particular appointments of conservative-leaning judges -- the former White House official suggested it may have not been worth it.
"Trump has reshaped the federal judiciary, particularly compared with what would have happened if Hillary Clinton had been president, and nothing else Trump has done—no moral line he has crossed, no offense he has committed—can take away from his achievements in this area," he wrote, "But if politically conservative evangelicals have things they can rightly claim to have won, what has been lost?"
According to Wehner, there is abject hypocrisy in the evangelical movement when it comes to Democrats who don't follow Christian ideals as they see them and Republican apostates who are forgiven with "verses like 'Judge not lest you be judged," with the columnist using, "If it’s Bill Clinton in the dock, savage him; if it’s Donald Trump, savage his critics," as an example.
"If evangelical supporters of Trump are honest, they should admit—at least to themselves, if not to the rest of the world—that something has gone terribly amiss and that the power they have achieved is coming at the expense of the faith they proclaim," he wrote.
"The Trump era is hardly the first or most egregious time that people who speak for Christianity have disfigured their faith. Furthermore, evangelicalism isn’t the whole of Christianity in America, and Christianity in America isn’t the vital center of Christianity in the world," he added before concluding, "What American evangelicals do certainly matters, though perhaps not quite as much as its champions and critics might think. And there are pockets of renewal within American evangelicalism, along with a deep desire among many Christians to close this unfortunate chapter in their history and write a far more enchanting and captivating one next."
President Donald Trump is doubling down on "toxic masculinity" no matter how much his personality flaws endanger his re-election chances, according the ghostwriter of his brand-making book.
Tony Schwartz, who helped Trump write his self-hyping "Art of the Deal," wrote a new column for The Daily Beast explaining how the president's masculine insecurity led to his consistently bad decisions.
"No disease is going to tell Trump what to do," Schwartz wrote. "He treats COVID as just another opponent he must squash — not by bringing the crisis under control for the sake of all citizens, but by minimizing and sneering at it himself. Likewise, no one is going to make him denounce the white supremacists who support him, and no defeat at the polls is going to force him to voluntarily give up the presidency, even if each of these stances make it more likely that he’ll lose the election."
Trump appears unsure what to do since he can't lie himself out of the public health crisis, and Schwartz said he's "terrified of what he'll do next."
"Now, sensing defeat, Trump is doing what he’s always done under stress: doubling and tripling down on whatever fictional facts he wishes were true," Schwartz said. "But this time, his brazen tactics have produced exactly what they’re meant to defend against. He looks weaker, more vulnerable, and more out of control than at any time since his election. His poll numbers have plummeted."
Trump's failures as president are all rooted in the personal failings that Schwartz saw up close in their 18 months working together.
"This is toxic masculinity in action — the sense of entitlement, the embrace of privilege, and the wanton exercise of authority over others," Schwartz wrote. "It’s also marked by the rejection of any qualities that might be considered feminine, including gentleness, vulnerability, and empathy — the very qualities that Biden is relying on to distinguish himself from Trump."
Speaking to a largely maskless crowd of supporters in Carson City, Nevada late Sunday, President Donald Trump mocked Democratic nominee Joe Biden for vowing to "listen to the scientists" on the Covid-19 pandemic if elected in November and boasted about his own refusal to heed the advice of experts even as coronavirus cases and deaths continue to surge nationwide.
"If I listened totally to the scientists, we would right now have a country that would be in a massive depression," Trump said, neglecting to mention that the U.S. is, in fact, currently in the midst of an unprecedented economic downturn.
"We're like a rocket ship, take a look at the numbers," the president added, remarks that came just days after the Labor Department reported that another 1.3 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits during the week ending October 10. According to data from the Census Bureau, nearly 80 million U.S. adults are struggling to afford basic necessities such as food and rent.
Watch Trump's comments:
The Biden campaign and allies of the former vice president were quick to respond to Trump's attack, which was in line with the president's repeated dismissals of expert recommendations and basic public health guidelines as the coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage the country.
Ronald Klain, Biden's former chief of staff who led the Obama administration's Ebola response, tweeted, "Trump admits he doesn't listen to scientists. No wonder the U.S. leads the world in Covid deaths."
Biden campaign spokesperson Andrew Bates called Trump's remarks "tellingly out of touch and the polar opposite of reality."
"Trump crashed the strong economy he inherited from the Obama-Biden administration by lying about and attacking the science, and layoffs are rising," Bates said.
The president's anti-science rhetoric, policies, and personnel moves—which have included the installation of political officials at federal public health agencies—have led nonpartisan publications and groups like Scientific American and the National Academy of Sciences to publicly criticize Trump, in some cases, call for his ouster in November.
"Policymaking must be informed by the best available evidence without it being distorted, concealed, or otherwise deliberately miscommunicated," the nonpartisan National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine said in a joint statement last month. "We find ongoing reports and incidents of the politicization of science, particularly the overriding of evidence and advice from public health officials and the derision of government scientists, to be alarming."
