Trump Claims US Has "Total Control Over" Virus, But Also Throws Up His Hands, Telling State Governors: "All of The Equipment, Try Getting It Yourself"

Gabe Sherman, of Vanity Fair writes:

"Trump thinks this is a media problem," a Republican close to the White House told me. ...

As Trump processes the stakes facing the country—and his presidency—he's also lashing out at advisers, whom he blames for the White House's inept and flat-footed response. ...

Sources told me Trump is regretting that [his son-in-law Jared] Kushner swooped into the coronavirus response last week. Kushner, according to sources, encouraged Trump to treat the emergency as a P.R. problem ... One source briefed on the internal conversations told me that Kushner advised Trump not to call a national emergency during his Oval Office address on March 11 because "it would tank the markets."

The markets cratered anyway, and Trump announced the national emergency on Friday. ... Trump was also said to be angry that Kushner oversold Google's coronavirus testing website when in fact the tech giant had a fledgling effort. Trump got slammed in the press for promoting the phantom Google product. "Jared told Trump that Google was doing an entire website that would be up in 72 hours and had 1,100 people working on it 24/7. That's just a lie," the source briefed on the internal conversations told me. ...

One reason the president's attitude may be changing is that coronavirus showed up at his doorstep, literally: Mar-a-Lago is now a hot spot. ...

Now that Trump is engaged and the crisis is accelerating—the Dow dropped nearly 3,000 points on Monday—Republicans fear he is operating without a playbook at a time when one is desperately needed. ... "This is not what he likes to do," a former West Wing official said. "There's no boogeyman he can attack." On Monday, Trump reportedly told governors they're on their own. "Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment—try getting it yourselves," Trump said on a conference call, according to the New York Times.

Digby:

He has no playbook but taking credit for things he did not do and blaming others for the things he did. He is completely out of his depth and it couldn't be more obvious.

Nonetheless, the press was very impressed today when he came before the cameras and admitted that up is up and down is down for a change. But it's too late for that. He is who he is and he thought that he could replicate his magical stock rebound of Friday by showing up at 3:30 and … saying something. But as he stood there, trying unsuccessfully to sound like a normal person, the stock market ticker just kept going down and down and down until it closed 3,000 points down — the largest point drop and the second-largest one-day percentage drop in history.

He has always believed that everything in life can be fixed with a savvy PR strategy. Between his daddy's money bailing him out and a willing media, it's worked for him. But he doesn't know what to do now and apparently, nobody around him does either (or, if they do, he won't listen to them.) ...

Today, Trump said: "Nobody knew how bad it was." ... Yet every medical person and scientist on the planet has been yelling warnings for the last eight weeks - and Trump was told of its severity way back in mid-January.

Now, he is reduced to posting racist tweets in a  lame attempt to deflect attention away from himself.

Fox News is supposedly calling this crisis "a crisis" and not a dastardly plot to destroy Dear Leader. ... Don't believe it. Its new strain of propaganda is that the US has more than enough tools to fight the virus. That, of course, is a lie, which echoes Trump's recent lie that "we have total control over" the virus.

Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, March 15, 2020:

It's worth noting that these growth rates are all based on official figures, and obviously they depend on how widespread testing is in various countries. The US numbers, for example, may be artificially low simply because we don't have test kits available. We won't know for sure until kits become widely available and we begin testing larger numbers of people.

Also worthy of note is that actions we take now will affect the growth of coronavirus a couple of weeks from now, but our growth rate over the next two weeks or so is probably set in stone no matter what we do. This is partly because of simple inertia in our public habits, and partly because the pool of victims that will be identified in two weeks already exists. They're asymptomatic right now, but they won't be for long. We should be preparing for a 10x increase in coronavirus cases over the next two weeks.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on Sunday, March 15:

The worst is yet ahead for us. ... [This is] a very, very critical point ...

Chris Hayes, MSNBC, March 11, 2020:

Tom Bossett, Trump's former Homeland Security adviser, told NBC News yesterday that we are 10 days away from the hospitals getting creamed.

The John Hopkins graphs show that the US on a similar trajectory as other countries that already have been very hard-hit. Drum mentions a possible ten-fold increase over the next two weeks and Fauci agrees this is a crucial time and the worst is still to come. Bossett's comment, made last Thursday, pinpoints this coming Friday as the "hospitals-getting-creamed" day.

Kiera Butler, Mother Jones, March 16, 2020:

In Private Facebook Groups, Doctors Share Their Worst Fears. We Talked to One of Them.

I'm a 38-year-old physician. My specialty is surgery, and I've been practicing for 12 years including surgical training. I'm a member of three different private coronavirus Facebook groups just for physicians and other health care providers. Each group has anywhere from about 5,000 to 45,000 members. I am not on the front lines right now, but what I'm hearing is really alarming.

I've never seen anything like this in my professional life.

Early on, from what we were hearing from the media, many of us were sort of thinking this is a disease really for older people. ... But what I'm hearing from these groups now is that people are seeing folks in their thirties and forties getting severely ill. ...

We are all looking at the Italian experience and the Chinese experience. There are now a lot of pictures of doctors in full gear ... In the most recent photos they are head to toe covered in gowns, with N95 masks. ... [W]e don't understand how our government can be saying that we don't need those masks and full coverage. ... If we don't have proper protection, providers are going to get the disease. And then we will be in a really bad situation ...

I'm seeing a lot of anxiety, especially from providers with young children, women who are pregnant. People in two physician households are really concerned about bringing this home to their kids and having it spread. What happens if they get sick? What happens if their spouse gets sick? ... A lot of people, when they get home from the hospital are stripping, running to the shower, washing everything. A lot of people have started sleeping separately, basically quarantining themselves. They are assuming that they've been exposed. So they're sleeping in the basement or another room, not seeing their kids, not wanting to risk it, which I'm sure is adding to the stress.

Someone asked yesterday in a post, what else should I be doing or thinking about? Should I be drawing up a will? And other people in the comments said they were also thinking about that. It's just heartbreaking. ...