Sunday, March 22, 2020

Trump Rejects Calls To Take Aggressive Action In Stopping Virus, While His Dept. Of Justice Is Making Moves To Indefinitely Suspend The Constitution

New York Times, March 22, 2020:
[Donald] Trump resisted appeals from state and local officials and hospital administrators for more aggressive action, saying he would not compel companies to make face masks and other gear to protect front-line health workers from the virus. ...

[Trump] said the federal government had placed orders for "hundreds of millions" of the N-95 face masks that can shield medical workers from the virus. ... Hanes [is] among those that had been enlisted to start churning out masks ... the company said they would not be the N-95 masks that are most effective in protecting medical workers.

Neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Pence would say when the masks would be ready. ... More than 21,000 cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed in the United States, and that number is expected to soar in coming weeks. ....

The lack of widespread access to tests has provoked a weekslong outcry nationwide. ...

[A] shortage of masks has become a bottleneck slowing the rollout of testing, which experts say is crucial to containing the virus. ...

It's not just masks. Ventilators are in short supply. And hospitals, running out of space, are cramming infected patients into tight quarters.
Nick Turse, The Intercept, March 20, 2020:
Italy's reported coronavirus death toll grew to more than 4,000 on Friday, outpacing China, a country with more than 20 times its population. The Italian health care system is now buckling under the weight of the pandemic. Health care professionals are working day and night to keep critically ill Covid-19 patients alive, while wartime triage conditions have left doctors to decide who lives and who dies. The crematorium in the hard-hit city of Bergamo is so overwhelmed that the army was brought in to deal with the corpses.

It could be a matter of weeks — or even days — before something similar happens here, Dr. Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The Intercept.

"Right now, the major concern that I have, and that other public health experts have, is the risk of outstripping health care capacity," said Frieden, who is currently a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. "This would be catastrophic. It's what we're seeing in Italy now, and it's what we could see in communities around the U.S. soon. ... We've seen terrible examples from Italy and Wuhan of thousands of health care workers getting infected, and we know that in the U.S. now, many health care workers have become infected."

New modeling and estimates point to a nightmare scenario in which there could be a tenfold greater need in the United States for intensive-care beds and ventilators than are available, Frieden said. ...

Last week, Frieden published a worst-case — but not implausible — scenario in which he warned that Covid-19 could potentially cause 1 million deaths in the United States alone.
Trump is being urged to act more aggressively in fighting the Covid-19 virus. He is flat-out refusing. ... Yet he also continues to hype untested drugs that some medical experts say could be fatal. (I guess dying qualifies as a "game-changer" for the person who took them.)

The one thing Trump is acting quickly on is trying to indefinitely suspend the Constitution.

Betsy Woodriff Swan, Politico, March 21, 2020:
The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the coronavirus spreads through the United States.

Documents reviewed by POLITICO detail the department's requests to lawmakers on a host of topics, including the statute of limitations, asylum and the way court hearings are conducted. POLITICO also reviewed and previously reported on documents seeking the authority to extend deadlines on merger reviews and prosecutions. ...

The move has tapped into a broader fear ... that the president will use a moment of crisis to push for controversial policy changes. Already, he has cited the pandemic as a reason for heightening border restrictions and restricting asylum claims. He has also pushed for further tax cuts as the economy withers, arguing that it would soften the financial blow to Americans. And even without policy changes, Trump has vast emergency powers that he could legally deploy right now to try and slow the coronavirus outbreak. ...

In one of the documents, the department proposed that Congress grant the attorney general power to ask the chief judge of any district court ... to pause court proceedings during emergencies. It would apply to "any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil process and proceedings," according to draft legislative language the department shared with Congress. ...

The request raised eyebrows because of its potential implications for habeas corpus –– the constitutional right to appear before a judge after arrest and seek release.

"Not only would it be a violation of that, but it says 'affecting pre-arrest,'" said Norman L. Reimer, the executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "So that means you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. I find it absolutely terrifying."
Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, New York Times, March 21, 2020:
During his campaign for the White House in 2016, President Trump's advisers briefly tried to run through with him how he would address a large-scale disaster if he won. What, for instance, would he have done during Hurricane Katrina?

"I would have fixed that," Mr. Trump replied with certitude, referring to the government's bungled rescue and recovery efforts ... "I would have come up with a much better response." How? He did not say. He just asserted it would have been better and advisers did not press him to elaborate.

Mr. Trump is no stranger to crisis. ... [But n]othing in his background in business, entertainment or multiple marriages prepared him for the coronavirus pandemic now threatening America's health and wealth.

Mr. Trump's performance on the national stage in recent weeks has put on display the traits that Democrats and some Republicans consider so jarring — the profound need for personal praise, the propensity to blame others, the lack of human empathy, the penchant for rewriting history, the disregard for expertise, the distortion of facts, the impatience with scrutiny or criticism. For years, skeptics expressed concern about how he would handle a genuine crisis threatening the nation, and now they know. ...

He has repeatedly misrepresented the state of the response ...

Mr. Trump's defensiveness over the pandemic has become a central dynamic inside the White House ... Aides have long understood that Mr. Trump needs to hear support for his decisions, preferably described in superlatives. ...

Over the last week, as Mr. Trump has faced ever more draconian and expensive options, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, sought to coax him into action by using bits of praise in news coverage ... as a motivator ...

Officials have learned that the president craves a constant diet of flattery ... Vice President Mike Pence makes a point of repeating it day after day ... Other advisers have followed suit. ...

None of which comes as a surprise to those who dealt with Mr. Trump or studied his life before he became president. In real estate, he found he could overcome crises by bluffing ... bullying ... [and] bamboozling ...

"The typical modus operandi from him is to bluff, is to fake, is to deny," said Jack O'Donnell, the former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. ...

Perhaps the only time before his presidency that the human toll of a crisis really struck Mr. Trump in a personal way came when three of his executives died in a helicopter crash heading to Atlantic City. He seemed genuinely shaken ...

Even then, Mr. Trump could not help inserting himself into the story, suggesting falsely that he almost boarded the helicopter himself. And within months, with his Taj project flailing, Mr. Trump began publicly attributing problems to the dead executives. ...

The closest analogue to the current situation may be the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, another national trauma. Mr. Trump tried to thrust himself into the news coverage, telling an interviewer by phone that day that with the destruction of the World Trade Center he now had the tallest building in New York City, a claim that was not even true. He also has said he spent extensive time around the site trying to help the cleanup, a claim that has never been verified. ...

Gwenda Blair, the author of a biography of the Trump family [said:] "He's trying to make the coronavirus into a loser and himself the winner. ... [T]he coronavirus, it's not a person, can't be bullied."

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