Donald Trump said that yesterday, the same day the United States recorded the most new coronavirus cases of any country in a single day since the pandemic began. There were 14,024 new cases.
Today, the United States broke that record, with 17,224 new cases.
(There is no doubt Trump praised himself several times today, as well. Every public appearance he makes now features him letting us know "many, many doctors" are "very complimentary" and "can't believe the great job" that Trump has done.)
The United States now has more coronavirus cases than any other country on the planet.
In California and New York, cases are doubling every three to four days.
Things are going to only get worse, because the US government has abdicated all responsibility towards its citizens, and because Donald Trump is an impatient five-year-old and is itching to "re-open" the country, because he thinks that will help the stock market and, by extension, his re-election chances. He is wrong on both counts. The market, which already had its worst day in 33 years earlier this month, will not react well to news of hundreds of dead Americans every day.
Heather Digby Parton, Hullaballo, March 26, 2020:
A Disgrace In The Richest Country In The WorldWindsor Mann, The Hill, March 26, 2020:
Because this administration refused to listen to the experts and decided they didn't need to prepare we are now letting people die for lack of protective gear for medical personnel:
Hospitals on the front lines of the pandemic are engaged in a heated private debate over a calculation few have encountered in their lifetimes — how to weigh the "save at all costs" approach to resuscitating a dying patient against the real danger of exposing doctors and nurses to the contagion of coronavirus. ...This is just … unbelievable. And it didn't have to happen: ...
Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago has been discussing a do-not-resuscitate policy for infected patients, regardless of the wishes of the patient or their family members — a wrenching decision to prioritize the lives of the many over the one. ...
The strategies are among hundreds of tactics and key policy decisions laid out in a 69-page National Security Council playbook on fighting pandemics, which POLITICO is detailing for the first time. Other recommendations include that the government move swiftly to fully detect potential outbreaks, secure supplemental funding and consider invoking the Defense Production Act — all steps in which the Trump administration lagged behind the timeline laid out in the playbook. ...Trump's only real method of decision-making when he came into office was to ignore or reverse anything the previous administration did. He was so unprepared and unfit that he didn't know anything else to do.
The playbook also stresses the significant responsibility facing the White House to contain risks of potential pandemics, a stark contrast with the Trump administration's delays in deploying an all-of-government response and President Donald Trump's recent signals that he might roll back public health recommendations. ...
The guide further calls for a "unified message" on the federal response, in order to best manage the American public's questions and concerns. ... However, the U.S. response to coronavirus has featured a rotating cast of spokespeople and conflicting messages; Trump already is discussing loosening government recommendations ... despite the objections of public health advisers.
The NSC devised the guide — officially called the Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents, but known colloquially as “the pandemic playbook” — across 2016. The project was driven by career civil servants as well as political appointees, aware that global leaders had initially fumbled their response to the 2014-2015 spread of Ebola and wanting to be sure that the next response to an epidemic was better handled.
The Trump administration was briefed on the playbook's existence in 2017, said four former officials, but two cautioned that it never went through a full, National Security Council-led interagency process to be approved as Trump administration strategy.
Now we are in a crisis and he is totally at sea. And Americans are dying.
What Trump's Coronavirus Briefings Are Really AboutBess Levin, Vanity Fair, March 23, 2020:
If you've watched President Trump's daily press briefings about the coronavirus outbreak, you've learned how little you've learned. Every time he talks about the pandemic, he tells us more about his narcissism than he does about the pandemic.
Trump began holding press briefings when he could no longer hold rallies, and for the same reason: He needs praise like he needs oxygen, and these briefings, like his campaign rallies, are his oxygen tank. Public health is not the point. They are about what Trump wants to hear, not what we need to know.
When he talks about the pandemic, he's vague, misleading, and self-congratulatory, often at the same time. "We have a lot of things happening, a lot of very positive things," Trump said while discussing things.
He prefers to discuss things that have nothing to do with the pandemic, such as his "very popular" wife and "Sleepy Joe Biden." While he has not called for the coronavirus to be locked up, he said, "We're building a wall." His logorrhea occasionally takes him into the unchartered territories of pseudo-empathy and complete sentences, as when he said, "Life is fragile" and "The whole concept of death is terrible."
Also terrible is the credit Trump isn't getting. More than anything, he wants to be commended. On Sunday, he complained that "nobody said thank you" after he donated part of his presidential salary to fighting the coronavirus. He donated $100,000, which is $30,000 less than what he spent on silencing a porn star.
Trump boasts of the job he's supposed to be doing ("a phenomenal job") and cites people without proper names as confirmation. "Many doctors — and I've read many, many doctors — they can't believe the great job that we've done" he claimed. He said governors are "loving what we're doing," "were thanking us for the job we did," and "were very complimentary." Asked if he sold any stocks before the epidemic, Trump compared himself to George Washington, "a rich man" who "ran the presidency and he also ran his business."
Even when Trump is not talking about himself, he talks about himself. A reporter asked if he regretted his handling of the crisis. "I'm not interested in myself," said Trump, putative author of eight books whose titles begin with "Trump", about himself.
When not praising himself, Trump vilifies those who fail to praise him as much as he does. He denounced "fake news" and "dishonest journalists." He reprimanded NBC News correspondent Peter Alexander for asking "a very nasty question" and told him, "You're a terrible reporter." He called The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal "very dishonest media sources." Last week, he said he wanted to "get rid of about another 75-80 percent of you. I'll just have two or three that I like in this room." The president is holding press conferences in a pandemic to say he wants to get rid of the press.
It's no wonder why he feels this way. Unlike at his rallies, where thousands of fans shout his name, the audience at his coronavirus briefings consists of reporters asking questions about the health and safety of Americans, all but one of whom are not him. ...
Last week, his friend Lou Dobbs gave him a farrago of praise, adulation, and exaltation. On Twitter, Dobbs asked people to "grade President Trump's leadership in the nation's fight against the Wuhan Virus." The three options were "superb," "great," and "very good." Two days later, Dobbs self-quarantined after one of his staffers contracted the coronavirus ...
Republicans have criticized Democrats for politicizing the pandemic. Yet, at his press briefings, Trump's sycophants, not health experts, do most of the talking, and most of their talking consists of praise for the president. They thank him for the opportunity to praise him. At Sunday's press briefing, the president's trade adviser Peter Navarro began his remarks by saying, "Thank you, sir. Thank you, Mr. President." He concluded by saying, "I salute you, sir."
Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, was not present at Sunday's or Monday's briefing. Fauci is an expert in infectious diseases, not assuaging Trump's ego. The more you know about something, the less Trump trusts you.
These are not press briefings. They are praise briefings.
White House: We're Going to Have to Let Some People Die So the Stock Market Can Live
One of the major reasons the United States is in the midst of a health crisis that has killed 427 people and infected at least 34,354 so far is the fatty mass inside Donald Trump's head that told him If you pretend like none of this is happening, it'll all just go away. Singularly obsessed with the stock market, the president squandered his opportunity to contain the novel coronavirus out of fear that taking strong action would damage the economy, telling advisers in February not to "do or say anything that would further spook the markets." Obviously that plan of "action" backfired so spectacularly that it would be quite funny if not for the whole life and death thing; weirdly, not doing anything about a deadly disease and insisting it was a hoax didn't actually make investors feel better. Terrified about the fact that the Dow and S&P were still regularly recording some of their worst days since the crash of '87, Trump decided roughly eight days ago to stop calling the pandemic "fake news" and actually advise people to take it seriously and stay home. One week, however, apparently represented the president's upper limit for acting quasi-responsibly. Last Thursday, he reportedly began talking privately about getting people back to work, just three days after the CDC rolled out a campaign to encourage everyone to stay home for at least 15 days. ...
Needless to say, telling people to get back to their normal lives within a fortnight is not at all what health experts have recommended. In fact, many agree we'll have to practice social distancing for at least a year and perhaps up to 18 months, the alternative literally being the death of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Faced with that choice, most people would probably go with the former, even if it meant major damage to economy. And then you have the ghouls of Team Trump:
Appearing Monday morning on Fox News' America's Newsroom, Trump's top economic adviser Larry Kudlow agreed that a pivot away from strict coronavirus measures could be on the horizon. "The president tweeted at midnight that we can't let the cure be worse than the problem," Fox News anchor Ed Henry declared. "He seemed to be talking about, in another week or so, making a decision to try to get the economy back open…How do you do that?"To be clear, the "trade-offs" Kudlow—who isn't actually an economist!—is referring to here are the deaths of a huge number of Americans.
Kudlow responded that "we'll have to ... make some difficult trade-offs."
It should disgust and frighten every free-thinking person that the conservative movement, and all its plush financial and propaganda institutions, instantly came around to the view that the weakest among us should die to strengthen society and protect Dear Leader. This is Nazism. https://t.co/bNgWwoS6rc— subscribe to my newsletter (@brianbeutler) March 26, 2020
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