Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Trump Blows His Big Coronavirus Test: Part II

COVERS APRIL 22-JUNE 3

6/3/20: The deaths of 106,000 Americans from the coronavirus are bad enough. The toll on jobs, as our economy ground to a halt, with more than 40 million Americans suddenly unemployed, are bad enough.

Now, on top of that we see scores of American cities torn apart by angry protests and rioting.

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This is a president who has no more moral authority than the cop who knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he was dead.
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And who do we look to in vain for a calming voice in a time of growing fury? Donald J. Trump?

He’ll go down in history as “The Great Divider.”

This is a president who has no more moral authority than the cop who knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he was dead.

Trump is what Trump is, an adept hater. That makes him the wrong man, in the wrong job, at the wrong time. From the start, his place at the pinnacle of the right-wing pantheon was carved out by birtherism. Racism by a new name. Citizen Trump claimed for years that Barack Obama wasn’t American. He said he could prove it. And he never did. Nor should that have come as a surprise. Donald had made race-baiting headlines before. In 1989 he came out with a full-page ad in the newspapers, demanding that the “Central Park Five” be executed for the crimes he had no doubt they had committed. He never apologized when the five young African American men—who spent years in jail—were totally exonerated. More recently, he gave a birther radio personality the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He employs a birther press secretary now.



Trump is who he is. He can’t help to heal a nation because his political power rests on division. He kicked off his run for the highest office we have to offer by vilifying all Mexicans. As president, he kept his base in terror, painting all immigrants as recruits for the MS-13 gang. He’s the leader who wanted to ban all Muslims from entering this country, even those men and women who had served alongside U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and hoped to immigrate. During his run for the White House, Trump appealed to fans like the West Virginia woman who called Michelle Obama “an ape in heels.” He employed a campaign co-chair in New York who joked that Mrs. Obama should go back to Africa, “live in a cave,” and maybe have sex with gorillas.

Trump is a twisted, toxic communicator. Since entering the political arena he’s managed to stoke the fevers of such neo-Nazi luminaries as Richard Spencer, David Duke and Rocky Suhayda. It was Suhayda who pointed out that Trump’s victory in 2016 represented “a real opportunity for people like white nationalists.” As candidate, Trump said he was thinking about paying the legal fees for a white fan who sucker punched a black protester, who was already being led out of one of his rallies by guards. Matthew Heimbach, another white supremacist, assaulted an African American woman at another rally in March 2016. His lawyer later claimed that his client could not be held at fault. Heimbach, because he had “acted pursuant to the directives and requests of Donald J. Trump and Donald J. Trump for President.” If his client was found liable for damages, the attorney told the judge, “any liability must be shifted to one or both of them.” The man who sits in the White House today gave the Holocaust denier, Arthur Jones, hope enough to run for Congress. He hired Carl Higbie, who joked about having people bring guns to the border to do target practice on illegals and opined that black women think “breeding is a form of government employment.” Later, while visiting Great Britain, the president retweeted posts from Katie Hopkins, a racist with an English accent, who once compared dark-skinned immigrants to “cockroaches.”

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Trump’s true skill set includes his ability to stir up anger and fear and fuel the hate.
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Naturally, one of Trump’s top aides is Stephen Miller. Miller is a soulless chap who subscribes to the “Great Replacement” myth, that dark people are plotting to replace the white race in Europe and America. Miller was the diabolical genius behind the decision to lock up little children in cages after they tried to sneak cross our border with their parents. And Trump is in sympathy all the way. The Great Divider himself referred to Haiti and a variety of African countries as “shitholes.” We didn’t want those people coming to our country. Trump said we’d be better off—wink, wink—if we had more immigrants from Norway. Then he denied having said it—because he’s a liar, too.

Trump’s true skill set includes his ability to stir up anger and fear, and fuel the hate. In the fall of 2016, the man who wished to be president began firing up his base by attacking NFL players who knelt in peaceful protest—against police brutality. After he was elected, he insisted that protesting players, predominantly African American, were disrespecting our military and our flag, and should lose their jobs. He even suggested that if they didn’t like it, they shouldn’t live in this country. When Jemele Hill, an African American sportscaster, labeled him a racist, Trump said she should be fired too. He called kneeling players like Colin Kaepernick sons-of-bitches. So police kept kneeling on the necks of others.

Trump has had almost a full term in office to learn how to unite rather than divide us. And he has learned less than nothing. Rather, he has regressed. Just last summer, he suggested that four female members of Congress, all individuals of color who had protested against his policies, should go back to countries where they came from if they didn’t like what he was doing. One of the four, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was born in the Bronx. Another, Ayanna Presley, was born here in Cincinnati. Presley’s ancestors arrived in American, via slave ship, long before the first Trump set foot on American soil in 1885.

Now we urgently need a leader who can display empathy. But the Great Divider can’t do it. When he gazes admiringly in the mirror, he is looking at all the people he cares about most.

Trump has never governed with all Americans in mind. His default setting is to appeal to the base instincts of his base. It’s them against the rest of us—and if he can stir anger against “treasonous” Democrats, supposedly flag-hating liberals, “Enemies of the People” in the free press, and his dark-skinned predecessor in the White House, he’s not only ready to do so, he’s in his element when he imagines he has cause to hate. If you care to look, the word “hate” litters the president’s Twitter feed, like bodies during a plague. The Democrats “hate” our military, he says. His critics “hate” our country. His political opponents “hate” the Second Amendment. Trump hates anyone who criticizes or doubts him and works hard to get his base to hate them, too.

Today, we must face up to facts. We know Trump might claim to care about George Floyd. We know he won’t. He won’t care, no matter how many African Americans are killed by police, because most would never vote for him in the first place. Trump won’t tweet sympathy for Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old ER-tech, shot eight times by police. And shot by mistake. Or Botham Jean, shot and killed by mistake, while in his apartment. Or Greg Gunn, shot in the back by a police officer, while Gunn was walking home from a card game. Or Sean Reed, a 21-year-old veteran, shot while live-streaming the incident on Facebook, so that you could hear the cops (who didn’t know his camera was on) laughing over his corpse. You won’t hear the Great Divider speak with feeling about Ahmaud Arbery, the black jogger, gunned down by neighbors (watch the video), at any of his MAGA rallies. Because many who attend those rallies love their AR-15’s way more than they love their neighbors with darker skins.

If you were to ask President Trump, after three-and-a-half years in office, who these people are—Frederick Douglass, Trayvon Martin, or Eric Garner, who died because he was illegally selling cigarettes (more video)—he wouldn’t know. He wouldn’t know nor care about Philando Castile (watch even more video if you’d like to see another senseless killing), Jordan Davis, William Green, Tamir Rice, killed at age 12, while wielding a toy pistol, Atatiana Jefferson (shot and killed by police in her own home) or Heather Heyer, a young white woman (run down and killed by a white supremacist at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.).

You remember what Trump said then: “Good people on both sides.”

Trump has continued, even today, to stoke the anger, as cities he is supposed to care about explode. And he has used the most ineloquent format possible to reach and fire up his base: Simplistic, 280-charcter tweets. When protesters gathered outside the White House on Friday night, Trump boasted that if they had breached the main fence, they would have been met with “vicious dogs” and the “most ominous weapons” he had ever seen. As he has often done before, he intimated that his critics, in this case, the protesters, were fake. Their anger was a hoax. They had no grievances worthy of respect. (Trump, after all, was one of many right-wing nuts who gave credence to the idea that survivors of the Parkland High School massacre were “crisis actors,” not real kids shocked by the carnage they had seen.) He said the crowd at the White House gate was “professionally organized,” not comprised of Americans expressing heartfelt anger and dismay. He commended the Secret Service in a series of tweets, saying agents “let the ‘protesters’ scream & rant as much as they wanted, but whenever someone.... ....got too frisky or out of line, they would quickly come down on them, hard - didn’t know what hit them.” 

George Floyd never knew what hit him, either, but for Trump, the simpler the message, the better it is when it comes to riling up his fans.

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And now it promises to get much worse if the Great Divider has his way. He wants to turn the U.S. military loose on American citizens, and he promised to fix the problem in our cities quick.


Tomorrow, we’ll look at that promise in depth. Trump has, in the past, indicated that he believed the Chinese government acted correctly in crushing the student-led protest at Tiananmen Square.

No telling where the bottom with Trump will be.


May 26-29: It should be obvious, even to his most loyal fans, that President Trump is enduring some of the most painful moments of his days in office. Not painful for others. Trump doesn’t feel the pain of others.

Painful for him.

Narcissism is the foundation of his personality and his presidency. And Trump knows more and more Americans are coming to understand that he is a profoundly damaged human being and a really lousy leader. In the harsh light of his historic failings, Trump is shriveling.

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If you missed the ugly news Thursday, another 2.1 million Americans filed for unemployment. That brings the staggering total (in ten weeks) to 40.8 million. Fortune estimates that the jobless rate when the May figures are released will be 23.9 percent.

The day before we hit another grim milestone, with the U.S. death toll from the novel coronavirus passing 100,000.

CDC also reports that we had another 19,860 confirmed cases of COVID-19 on May 27  and 21,304 on May 28.

That brought the total for the month to 657,381. But our Narcissist-in-Chief still gazes admiringly at his reflection in the mirror and tells himself he’s doing a fantastic job meeting this crisis. The U.S. has more than 1.7 million cases of COVID-19, four times as many as any other nation on earth. (And, Brazil, the nation in second is led by another virus denier.)


Trump focuses on his own hurt first.

Yet, on Twitter, Trump recently posted:

Great reviews on our handling of Covid 19, sometimes referred to as the China Virus. Ventilators, Testing, Medical Supply Distribution, we made a lot of Governors look very good - And got no credit for so doing. Most importantly, we helped a lot of great people!

It’s telling that Trump focuses on his own hurt first. That he “got no credit.” Only then does he mention helping “a lot of great people.”

Trump always thinks of himself first. Then he thinks again. And he thinks of himself second.

He is a fundamentally flawed man.

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At the same time, a president who never hesitates to go low, went low this week, lower and finally, lowest.

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The president has taken the story of his wife’s death and “perverted it for perceived political gain.”
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The low came when Trump decided to suggest that MSNBC morning host and former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough was complicit in a murder. According to Trump, the death of Lori Klausutis, an aide who worked for Scarborough in 2001, remains “suspicious.”

(The coroner long ago ruled the death the result of natural causes.)   

Ms. Klausutis’ former husband finally asked Twitter to remove Trump’s tweets on the topic. Then he wrote a letter, which The New York Time published, saying that the president had taken the story of his wife’s death and “perverted it for perceived  political gain.”

Trump started taking heat, even from the few Republicans who still have souls. So he trotted out Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany to explain to reporters. McEnany said she didn’t know if the president had seen Mr. Klausutis’ letter. But, she did want everyone to know “our hearts are with Lori’s family at this time.” 

You knew as soon as those false words spilled from her lips, that McEnany hadn’t given a thought to the Klausutis family in the past nineteen years, until Trump started tweeting shit.

When reporters questioned Trump, himself, later, he said, no, he didn’t feel bad about spreading the conspiracy theory. “A lot of people have been saying that,” he claimed.

He was just repeating what they said.

That was the new Trump low. But Wednesday he sank lower. On Twitter, Trump retweeted some cowboy-looking dude telling a gathering, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”

Ha, ha! So humorous! What next: “The only good Indians is a dead Indian?” What could go wrong?

But there it was: the President of the United States offering tacit approval for a man suggesting that we’d all be better off if someone killed the 31% of adults in this country who call themselves Democrat.

How do you go lower than that? You tweet even more crap. In the wake of the tragic death of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of white Minneapolis police, the city has erupted in protest—and then rioting. How, then does Trump decide to help? First, he attacked Mayor Jacob Frey.

And, here, let us pause a moment to revisit other times Trump has responded to tragedy by attacking those who have suffered, rather than displaying even the slightest shreds of empathy. One might be reminded of the time Trump called the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico “an ingrate,” after her city and island were smashed by hurricanes, and she didn’t praise him highly enough.

Or the time he attacked the Chicago police superintendent in the wake of a bloody weekend of shootings.

Or the time he called the mayor of London “a stone cold loser,” in the wake of a rash of terrorist-related stabbings.

Or the time he went to El Paso after a mass shooting, and at a hospital, where he was supposed to be comforting the wounded, decided to brag about how big his crowds were at a recent rally.

In other words, Trump has gone low many times before, and lower many times, also. Now, with an American city in flames, he tweeted twice.

First:

I can’t stand back & watch this happen to a great American City, Minneapolis. A total lack of leadership. Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right.....

Then:

....These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!

Once again, you have the essence of a sick human being. For Trump, all the people out that night—not just the looters, but the people really protesting—are all the same. They’re THUGS.

You have the bombastic claim of a man terminally ill with narcissism, “I won’t let it happen.”

Then the simplistic solution: “Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

And you end with an incongruous: “Thank you.”

Let’s be clear. No one on the left is advocating looting or burning down buildings. But when governments start shooting into crowds, results are almost always bad. We know this from the Boston Massacre in 1770, to Sand Creek in 1864, to the Ludlow blood bath in 1913, to the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, to Sharpeville in 1960, to Kent State in 1970, to Tiananmen Square in 1989, to Khartoum in 2019, and from too many other examples to list. Bullets fired into crowds often hit innocent bystanders. Excessive force—for example, shooting a young man absconding from a looted store with a $100 pair of tennis shoes—is clearly not the answer needed, when the precipitating cause of the protests/rioting/looting was excessive force used on Floyd in the first place.

But Trump doesn’t consider nuance. He’s all about macho posturing. It’s his image he cares most about. Narcissism first. Narcissism last.

If shooting other Americans can elevate him in the eyes of his base, he’s ready to start shooting.

Or: to have others do the shooting.

I’m not sure you can go lower than this; but this is Trump we’re talking about. So, the bottom may not have been reached.

It probably hasnt.

Sand Creek, 1864.

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Masks for experts. No mask for the fool.


Trump is who he is: This weekend Disinfectant Don, Deal Maker Don, Divot Don, Dimwit Don, and Dictator Don have all been on display.

Despicable Don.

The prize that wasn't.



May 23-25: No telling right now, whether we’re headed for a gradual recovery or a fresh explosion of COVID-19 infections.


Another 559,668 confirmed cases.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. racked up 24,268 more cases Friday. On Saturday we had 26,229. Sunday numbers will be posted on Memorial Day, but the CDC is reporting 97,049 Americans have died. Total number of new cases this month? According to CDC: 559,668.

Remember when President Trump said we needn’t worry because the disease would go away in April?

Like a miracle, he said!

Turning water into wine, this is not. Johns Hopkins University has the following numbers posted Monday afternoon: 1,651,254 confirmed cases in the U.S., including 97,850 dead.

Brazil, led by another virus denier, is second with 363,211 cases. Russia, also led by a virus denier, trails slightly, but has dropped to third place. The U.K. stands second in deaths with 36,875.

Worldometers runs similar numbers, but updates faster. They have the U.S. death toll at 99,450, or 301 persons per million. Russia, where Putin clamps down on any news he doesn’t like, reports only 25 deaths per million. Germany, which handled the threat effectively from the start—because Chancellor Angela Merkel is a trained scientist and not a golf-club wielding, tweeting fool—has 100 deaths per million. The top ten U.S. states for infections are:

New York                 371,193
New Jersey              155,384
Illinois                     110,304
California                  94,486
Massachusetts            92,675
Pennsylvania              71,961
Texas                         56,166
Michigan                   54,679
Florida                      51,746                  
Maryland                   47,152

Cases are increasing in the following states:



Overall, cases in the U.S. are falling; but this may be true only because several of the hardest hit states have managed to slow the spread, particularly New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts:




Where do we stand on this Memorial Day weekend? Hard to know for sure. We do know on Saturday, that Divot Donald managed to get out for a round of golf at last. That might help the President Trump’s mood, since playing golf is what he really likes best.

(Well, that, and grabbing women by the privates.)

Plus, he got in another round of golf on Sunday, just to be safe. No mask for Divot Don; but his Secret Service detail masked up.

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We all know by now that Donald J. Trump is truly terrible when it comes to making predictions. You know—Mexico will pay for the wall! Repealing and replacing Obamacare will be “so easy.” The federal deficit will be erased while he’s in the Oval Office.

And, we’re going to be at zero cases of coronavirus soon.


Deal Maker Don: Just as clueless as Disinfectant Don.

Now, as we approach the second anniversary of Deal Maker Don’s greatest deal, we discover he was clueless again. It seems like a thousand years ago, but remember when Donald was touting his chance to win the Nobel Peace prize? He said he had earned his imaginary award by convincing North Korea to agree to give up all its nuclear weapons.

In fact, Deal Maker Don boldly announced in June 2018: “North Korea is no longer a nuclear threat.” And because he had worked out the best deal ever, he claimed the American people could “sleep well tonight.”

Sadly, Trump’s deal was ephemeral. Kim Jong-un didn’t give up all his weapons. He didn’t give up any, really. He even built more.

Now the homicidal dictator—I mean Mr. Kim—has decided to promote several officials who have been helping expand the North’s nuclear program. North Korea is still a nuclear threat. The official, government-run Korean Central News Agency explains:

Set forth at the [latest top-level] meeting were new policies for further increasing the nuclear war deterrence of the country and putting the strategic armed forces on a high-alert operation. Taken at the meeting were crucial measures for considerably increasing the firepower strike ability of the artillery pieces of the Korean People’s Army.



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We should also focus clearly, on this Memorial Day, when we remember those who have died fighting for our freedoms, to focus on Dictator Don’s growing anger with the free press. If all you watch is Fox News, you won’t realize it, because you will be inundated with fifty stories about Joe Biden’s recent gaffe, saying black people who support Trump “ain’t black.” True. Biden’s comment was a gaffe. But Dictator Don has been pedaling crazy shit.


Dictator Don’s Alter Ego: Detective Don.

The latest example involves Trump tweeting unfounded conspiracy theories about former Congressman and current MSNBC morning host, Joe Scarborough. Trump loathes his show. And that meant, Saturday, you had Trump suggesting that “Psycho Joe,” as he calls him, had had a hand in the murder of an intern in 2001. “A blow to her head?” Detective Donald wondered. “Body found under his desk? Left Congress suddenly? Big topic of discussion in Florida...and, he’s a Nut Job (with bad ratings). Keep digging, use forensic geniuses!”

(The fact that Trump considers “bad ratings” as bad as Scarborough’s imaginary involvement in a murder tells you all you need to know about this truly twisted human being we are stuck with as president.)

With Trump, of course, there’s always more. So he also attacked his former Attorney General, Jeff Sessions:

Jeff, you had your chance & you blew it. Recused yourself ON DAY ONE (you never told me of a problem), and ran for the hills. You had no courage, & ruined many lives. The dirty cops, & others, got caught by better & stronger people than you. Hopefully this slime will pay a big...

...price. You should drop out of the race & pray that super liberal @DougJones, a weak & pathetic puppet for Crazy Nancy Pelosi & Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, gets beaten badly. He voted for impeachment based on “ZERO”. Disgraced Alabama. Coach @TTuberville will be a GREAT Senator!

Dictator Donald naturally turned to dehumanizing language again. It’s a Hitlerian tactic, one Trump loves to employ. His enemies are never human. In this case, they’re “slime.”

And then—with the nation in the middle of a crippling health/economic crisis, you had Dimwit Don retweeting idiotic shit from idiots. In this case John K. Stahl got a series of retweets from the president.

Included was this juvenile bit of idiocy, with Nancy Pelosi as his (and the president’s) target: “Anyone know what’s going on with PolyGrip? I’ve noticed lately that her face seems glossy and she is sporting a poorly marked 2nd set of eyebrows. I’m thinking it’s an extreme case of incurable TDS. Any thoughts?”

Stahl included this “photo” and Dimwit Don loved it and passed it on to his cultish followers, who liked it also:


  
This, then, is the essence of who Donald J. Trump is—a most deplorable human being.

Deplorable Don.
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The National Parks are beginning to reopen.


May 19-22: There is so much bad news right now and so much that might be said, we hardly know where to begin or how to end. Let’s just dive right in and try not to drown.

First: the coronavirus disaster figures.

Another 2.4 million Americans filed unemployment claims in the last reporting period. That brings the total in nine weeks to 38.6 million. To get some sense of the scope of the disaster, the U.S. workforce in February—all those employed, and all those searching for jobs—totaled 164.6 million people. The losses, equal to more than 23% of all employees, have been staggering.

Friday afternoon the Johns Hopkins University website has us at 1,590,349 confirmed cases of COVID-19. We have also lost 95,553 dead. We have almost five times as many cases as Russia or Brazil, second and third most-hard hit nations. We have more than two-and-a-half times as many deaths as the United Kingdom, second-worst in that category.

Those four countries, top four in confirmed cases, all happen to be led by some of the biggest virus deniers in the world.
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“So, I view it as a badge of honor. Really, it’s a badge of honor.”

President Donald J. Trump
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Even these grim figures have not sobered Mr. Trump. When not busy blaming President Obama or China or his own CDC for the mess he has us in, he’s still making stunning claims.

If you  missed this one Tuesday, I am not making it up. When reporters asked about the rising number of cases, and particularly the death toll, the President of the United States offered this incredible analysis:

“By the way, you know, when you say that we lead in cases, that’s because we have more testing than anybody else,” the president said at the White House. “When we have a lot of cases, I don’t look at that as a bad thing. I look at that in a certain respect as being a good thing, because it means our testing is much better. So, if we were testing a million people instead of 14 million people, it would have far few cases, right?

“So, I view it as a badge of honor. Really, it’s a badge of honor,” Trump said.

For real—he said it was a badge of honor. You almost expected him to take a celebratory swig of bleach to mark the occasion.

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To be honest, this blogger has been hoping Trump would run into trouble, to ensure that the American people would bounce him out on in November. Trump is, for example, an existential threat to the rule of law. He stirs hate in his base to serve his purposes.

And the Russians clearly helped him win in 2016 and he has always known that, too.


Unemployment likely to remain above 11%.

Anyway, I admit I have been praying Trump would run into problems and be denied a second term. But not this! The Congressional Budget Office warns that the jobless rate will remain above 11% the rest of the year.

It will fall in 2021, but only to 9.3%.

These are catastrophic numbers and equal great pain and suffering for millions of Americans, both Trump fans, and Trump detractors alike. No one could have wanted this.

Eric Trump has been saying that Democrats wanted “millions” to die. Now he says Democrats are “milking” the crisis because they don’t want his dad to be able to hold his giant rallies. But Eric is an asshole, like his dad. “They think they are taking away Donald Trump’s greatest tool, which is being able to go into an arena and fill it with 50,000 people every single time,” he told Judge Jeanine Pirro, on her nightly show. “You watch, they’ll milk it every single day between now and Nov. 3. And guess what, after Nov. 3 coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen.”

(We could be mean here and mention that Eric’s dad said the virus would go away in April—and then we could be meaner and mention that the U.S. has already piled up nearly 500,000 new cases in May. But sometimes, making fun of Team Trump, generally, and members of Team Trump, individually, is just too easy. And, in this crisis, way less fun.)

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Consider the economic damage: Even Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is offering dire predictions. If states delay reopening, he warns, there may be “permanent damage” to the economy. Even if they open quickly, he warns, “the worst is yet to come.”


Great Depression unemployment numbers?

The official unemployment rate, 14.4% in April, could surpass 25% when May stats are totaled. Those are numbers not seen since 1932, during the depths of the Great Depression.

And if anything, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome H. Powell has been even more dour. He calls what we are seeing “the biggest shock” to the economy “in living memory.” Powell warns that failure to support state and local governments (an idea the president has floated, because he doesn’t want to help out any blue states) will weigh down any recovery we might see.

Morgan Stanley experts expect the U.S. economy to shrink by 38% in the second quarter of this year.

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So, the real question is what happens next, as states and cities slowly opening up again? Do “We the People” shop like mad and travel with reckless abandon? Do bars and restaurants rebound? Does Major League baseball reboot? Do college students return in the fall?

And will idiots every wear masks?

Now that many of the gems of the U.S. National Park system are open again, we known thousands of visitors descended on Yellowstone in recent days. A video analysis of crowds gathered to see Old Faithful erupt offered a summary: “Not much physical distancing happening and not a single mask in sight.”

This blogger is a huge fan of the parks; but this does not make him want to leap into his car and head for the woods.

Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River.
Note tourists overlooking falls, top right.

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The problem, then, is clear. According to the U.S. Travel Association, more than half of the  15.8 million travel-related jobs in the U.S. have been lost.

The carnage, as of now, stands at 51%.

So, let’s hope for a speedy economic recovery. And, please, don’t be an asshole. When you go out in public, wear a mask. Don’t cough germs on others. Help the U.S. travel industry rebound.

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What could go wrong if you don’t wear a mask? Consider the case of a rural Arkansas church. According to the CDC, 92 persons attended services from March 6 to March 11; 35 parishoners came away infected. Both the pastor and his wife fell ill.

Three people died.

Contact tracing also showed that those infected at church infected 26 others in the wider community. So, when visitors like Jacob Willis, who lives in Florida, hop in cars and head for Yellowstone, you have to hope they don’t bring the virus with them and cough on the bears.

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“The surest way to know where outbreaks are growing and where testing is being done.”

Tampa Bay Times
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Then again, it appears that some state leaders want us to see only good news. We learn this week that Rebekah Jones, data manager in charge of compiling Florida statistics on the virus, says she was fired after complaining about being ordered to delete data that made it clear the disease was spreading far and wide in her state.

The Tampa Bay Times explains:

The dashboard that Jones managed is the best official source for in-depth data on how the deadly pandemic is moving through the state. Studying it is the surest way to know where outbreaks are growing and where testing is being done. Without access to the data, Floridians would have to rely on the word of officials and politicians without being able to verify for themselves.

Or, as Gov. Roy DeSantis might say: We’re doing great here in Florida! Hardly any cases. Come on down!

Bring your wallets and go home with the virus!

Chart of Florida Cases

We hope Florida's spike is an aberration.

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With Americans dying by the tens of thousands, you might expect President Trump to show a little empathy.

That would be akin to expecting donkeys to recite the multiplication tables. You may already know. But the president’s lawyers have been arguing before the Supreme Court. They have insisted that he cannot be sued while president—because he would have to devote some of his precious time to dealing with the legal issues—and he’s too busy working 24 hours a day for the American people.


Trump pines for a sexual predator.

Yet we know Disinfectant Donald always finds time to tweet! This week, to cite just a handful of examples, Trump tweeted: “LOSER.” That one-word bit was paired with a video clip of Mitt Romney, showing election results from 2012. Because nothing says, “I’m working around the clock” quite like focusing on an election from eight years ago. According to a retweet we learn that the president agrees, Fox newscaster Neil Cavuto is “an asshole.” Another retweet labels Cavuto an “idiot.” By comparison, Pete Hegseth, a Fox pundit who never misses an opportunity to praise the president, is called—by the pleased president—“A Great Patriot.” Trump also finds time to take another shot at Joe Scarborough, host of a morning show on MSNBC—who he has been accusing recently of having been involved in the murder of a young intern, while serving in Congress decades ago. Trump labels him, simply “Morning Psycho.” Even better, the man who never stops working for the American people during this time of crisis (except when he’s binging on cable news or tweeting thousands of times) makes it plain. He’s had it with Fox News! Period. Fox, he grumbles, “is no longer the same. We miss the great Roger Ailes. You have more anti-Trump people, by far, than ever before. Looking for a new outlet!”

Yes, we miss “the great Roger Ailes.” Last seen exiting Fox News in the wake of multiple claims (and several legal settlements) for sexually harassing female employees. For example: Gretchen Carlson.

Also: Megyn Kelly.

Also Laurie Luhn. Andrea Tantaros Rudi Bakhtiar. Shelly Ross. Kellie Boyle. Marsha Callahan. Randi Harrison.

And at least nine other anonymous accusers.

*

This pair of tweets, however, may be my all-time favorites from Disinfectant Don. Here he reveals, in naked form, what he views as the true job of the free press. Yes, he’s miffed with Fox News; but we know now exactly what has been—and Trump still thinks is—the role of Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham and Bill Hemmer and the rest of the toadying crew.

And we know, also, that tens of thousands of Americans, who hit “love” after seeing this tweet, were too obtuse to see danger staring them in the face. The President of the United States wants, frankly, for the “free press” to serve him.



Postscript: Asked Wednesday if he could have done anything differently to address the threat of the coronavirus—you know, like not saying we were headed for zero cases in late February—Trump didn’t blink before answering. He said his team had done “amazingly well.” He said the U.S. and Germany and a few other little countries had kept the death toll low, if you adjusted for population.

The man is a liar.

Germany has done an excellent job, with only 99 deaths per million population. We stand at 291 per million.

Not in the same ballpark.

Other large countries doing better than the U.S.: Australia: 4 per million; South Korea: 5; Japan: 6; Ukraine: 13; Canada: 163. 
___



May 18: Yesterday, on the main fan site for the Cincinnati Bengals, I was reading a story about chances the team would be able to open up the 2020 season on time, later in the summer. Several Bengals loyalists commented on the article, insisting that the NFL should have no problem going forward. Because—really—the mortality rate for COVID-19 was no worse than regular flu. I was dubious, to say the least. I keep checking the numbers and that “it’s just the flu” kind of assessment doesn’t seem to hold up.


When two or three other fans insisted that the “real death rate” from the coronavirus was around one-tenth to four-tenths of one percent, I felt compelled to comment.

First, I checked the CDC website, which gave me a tally of the dead: 89,407, as of Monday. Then I did the math. If CDC had the number of deaths right and even if one percent of people who contracted the coronavirus died, that would have meant we had already had 8,940,700 cases of COVID-19 in this country. Only the top scientists in the world didn’t know it.

But these other Bengals fans were saying the death rate was one-tenth of one percent. That would be a fatality rate similar to seasonal flu—one death for every 1,000 cases. That would indicate that we had already had 89,407,000 cases in this country, but CDC just didn’t realize.

I can’t buy that kind of math—even though, in right-wing land, it’s the new way of saying, Trump is actually doing a great handling this crisis and we should reopen all restaurants, bars and stadiums and get out there and cough on each other to our heart’s content.




*

So, let’s keep it simple for today and tally the damage done just this month. The CDC updates 24-hours after the fact. When I checked Monday afternoon the U.S. was still piling up more confirmed cases and more deaths than any other country.

New confirmed cases by day:

May 17:        13,284
May 16:        31,967
May 15:        22,977
May 14:        27,191
May 13:          20,869
May 12:          21,467
May 11:          18,106
May 10:          23,792
May 9:            26,660
May 8:            25,996
May 7:            28,974
May 6:            25,253
May 5:            22,303           
May 4:          19,138
May 3:          29,763
May 2:          29,794
May 1:          30,369
______________________________________________

TOTAL:     417,903*

Fatalities: 89,407

*To keep that number in perspective, the U.S. has racked up more cases in May than any other country has throughout this crisis.

And Trump said the virus would go away in April.

*

Meanwhile, members of Team Trump continued to go tweeting along. Papa Trump got off a classic mishmash of falsehoods with this:

Wow! The Front Page @washingtonpost Headline reads, “A BOOST IN TESTS, BUT LACK OF TAKERS.” We have done a great job on Ventilators, Testing, and everything else. Were left little by Obama. Over 11 million tests, and going up fast. More than all countries in the world, combined.

____________________

“In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

Donald J. Trump
____________________


First, let’s ignore the stupidity. Trump continues to blame his predecessor for not handling a virus that did not exist when Obama exited office. “Disinfectant Don” also hopes his silly supporters won’t realize that he could have ramped up any government program he wanted—in the three years, four months, since he plunked down in the Oval Office. He could have focused on pandemic threats, instead of, say, touting his Space Force, or talking endlessly about the need for a Great Wall of Trump. We do know he never mentioned any coronavirus threat, or even any coronavirus, in something like his first 40,000 presidential tweets. His first tweet on the topic came on January 24. And, typically, Trump got it wrong. “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” he said with equal parts confidence and cluelessness. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

It’s also worth noting that the Washington Post story didn’t carry the headline the Liar-in-Chief said it did. The actual headline: AS CORONAVIRUS TESTING EXPANDS, A NEW PROBLEM ARISES: NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE TO TEST.

Nor does the article validate Trump’s handling of the crisis, as he hopes his followers will believe it does. The Post did say there were at least a dozen states, like Utah, which had the capacity to test more people than it had people showing up to be tested. But it wasn’t because the federal government had done such a good job of handling the threat. In many sparsely-populated states—like Utah—large percentages of people live a long way from testing sites. There’s also mass confusion about who should take tests and who needn’t bother. And anyone who has listened to Trump babble in press conferences knows how confusing his “advice” has been.

“Bartender, give me a shot of bleach!”

Finally, many states have the lab capacity to test more people than they are. But four months into this crisis they are still having difficulty procuring “personal protective equipment (PPE), nasal swabs and reagents, the chemicals necessary to process tests.” California is using only 40% of its testing capacity due, says the governor, to “supply-chain constraints.” In Chicago testing at many urgent-care facilities ground to a halt recently when medical staff ran out of kits. And in Washington D.C., right outside the White House door, labs could test 3,700 people per day. But they have the necessary reagents to do only 1,500 tests daily.

True, a close reading of the story in the Post would indicate that Team Trump is doing a better job lately of addressing the crisis.

But “better” isn’t high praise when you start off with a baseline of incredible blundering and sustained virus-denial.


Trump was lying then, too.

Last, but not least, is the president even correct when it comes to the math? What about this claim that we are testing more than all other countries combined? Trump has made this same claim before. He was lying then, too. Let’s assume he wanted to get his facts straight, even if we know he never really cares. Disinfectant Don could check the Worldometers website. He would know that, as of Monday, the United States had conducted 12.1 million tests.

Then he could add up—let’s just say all the tests for the next nine countries with the most confirmed cases of COVID-19.

As of Monday, Russia had done 7.1 million tests. And you figure Vladimir Putin shouldn’t have been bragging about how great his country was doing, beating the coronavirus. On March 22, he noted that, thanks to him, Russia had fewer infections than Luxembourg. Here we are two months later with Russia having more confirmed cases than any other country on earth—except the United States.

Spain, with the third most infections, had performed 3.0 million tests.

The United Kingdom had done 2.7 million tests. Wait? That means these three countries combined had done more than the U.S. And we might point out that on May 3, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that because of his fine leadership the U.K. had managed to “avoid the tragedy that engulfed other parts of the world.”

We could stop right there, having already shown that Trump was talking through a very tall hat. But, what the hell. Add in Brazil (.7 million tests), where President Jair Bolsonaro once called COVID-19 “a little flu.” Now his country was “climbing the charts” in infectious spread. Rounding out the “Top Ten” in order of countries with the most infections: Italy (3.0 million tests peformed); France (1.4 million); Germany (3.1 million); Turkey (1.7 million) and Iran (.7 million).

Total: 23.4 million, meaning Trump was off by a mile, as he so often is. And, a quick estimate, after scanning the list for all other countries, would add somewhere close to 25 million more tests.

*

Also tweeting sweet nonsense on Monday, we had this:



  
I should have added: “or my granddaughter.”
___


Time magazine cover story: May 25, 2020.


May 17: President Trump was in a celebratory mood on Sunday, tweeting about his success taming the coronavirus! “Doing REALLY well, medically,” he claimed incongruously, “on solving the CoronaVirus situation (Plague!). It will happen!”

Time to check the numbers to see if we were “doing REALLY well, medically.” According to John Hopkins University, by Sunday evening, the United States of America had:
 1,486,423 confirmed cases of COVID-19 (roughly 1.2 million more cases than the next most infected nation: Russia).

We also lead the world in deaths: 89,550, placing us first in a race where you want to finish last.




With the grim numbers piling up daily, Peter Navarro, one of Trump’s top economic advisers, spent Sunday morning trying to pass the buck from Trump to anyone else. “Early on in this crisis, the CDC, which really had the most trusted brand around the world in this space—really let the country down with the testing,” Navarro said.

And if that wasn’t enough—the ballsy nerve to blame a government agency led by a Trump appointee, an agency of the government Donald J. Trump leads—HHS Secretary Alex Azar had another explanation for the high death rates in this country. Americans weren’t dying because he and Trump fumbled the ball. Not at all. Americans were dying more than, say, Canadians or Germans because they were fat. Azar cited “comorbidities,” or underlying conditions, as the reason for America’s high death toll. Just to be clear, he ticked them off: Obesity. Hypertension. Diabetes.

Really…what could Health and Human Services do about that? If you died from COVID-19, it was actually your own fault.

*

With thousands dying every day and millions unemployed, we might forget that Disinfectant Donald is still threatening the rule of law in other ways. Lately, he has made a hobby of firing Inspector Generals. If you’re not clear, the job of any IG is to make sure that people working at the federal agency he or she oversees don’t break any laws.

The latest victim of a Trumpian desire to rule like a king—the fourth IG he has fired in two months—was the IG for the State Department, Steve Linick. According to multiple reports, Linick had opened at least one investigation into possible illegal actions by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. So, Pompeo recommended his firing. Trump agreed.

(I can find only one example of President Obama relieving an IG in his eight years as president. I also find one case where President George W. Bush was asked to fire an IG. Robert W. Cobb resigned instead.)


“To root out fraud and other wrongdoing.”

As usual, most Republicans are too cowardly to complain about the president’s assault on the rule of law. One U.S. Senator did show a dash of courage. A second protested, but we’ll have to wait to see if there are any results. A third expressed concern.

Starting with the last of the three: Sen. Susan Collins, who finds herself is in a real fight to retain her seat in November, went on record via Twitter:

I have long been a strong advocate for the Inspectors General. They are vital partners in Congress’s effort to identify inefficient or ineffective government programs and to root out fraud and other wrongdoing.

The investigations and reports of IGs throughout the government help Congress shape legislation and oversight activities – improving government performance, providing important transparency into programs, and giving Americans better value for their tax dollar.

The President has not provided the kind of justification for the removal of IG Linick required by this law [emphasis added].

See! Concern! The president might be breaking the law….

____________________

“It is a threat to accountable democracy and a fissure in the constitutional balance of power.”

Senator Mitt Romney
____________________


Chuck Grassley, GOP chairman of the Senate Finance Committee was blunt. But the question remains. Will Grassley act? He made it clear to reporters that inspectors-general were “crucial in correcting government failures and promoting the accountability that the American people deserve.”  Congress, he pointed out, “requires written reasons justifying an IG’s removal. A general lack of confidence,” which Trump had cited as his reason for dumping Linick,  would not “satisfy Congress.”

Sen. Mitt Romney, who seems to be the only GOP senator still in possession of a pair of nuts, was more direct. He warned that Trump’s firings of multiple inspectors-general were “unprecedented” and “doing so without good cause chills the independence essential to their purpose….It is a threat to accountable democracy and a fissure in the constitutional balance of power.”

Also: Don’t drink disinfectant to combat the coronavirus, folks.
___



May 16: Here in Glendale, Ohio, where I live people were out in force Friday and Saturday evening, eating and drinking at outdoor tables in the village square. I’m going to be diplomatic and say that, generally speaking, revelers seemed not to believe:

a.     Masks were a good idea.
b.    Six feet = seventy-two inches.
c.     People serving them food and drink might be nervous about getting coughed on by patrons.

In any case, the country is opening up, for good or ill, no one knows. It’s easy to understand why people want to get back to work, why business owners want to open. It’s also easy to understand why people going back to work might want customers to work a little harder to help them remain safe. And, since I have three daughters in the medical field, I understand why frontline medical people are worried we might be opening up too soon.

The math will help determine whether we are making a mistake. Saturday, the CDC recorded 31,967 new cases of the coronavirus. That would make it the worst single day since April 25. Could be an aberration.

Could be the start of a Trump Bump.

This brings the total number of cases in May to 404,652.
___





May 15: The country is staggering towards a reopening and a highly uncertain recovery. But, by god, we’ve got binders! The best binders. Not one binder. We have two binders! Binders that prove Donald J. Trump is the best president ever.

President Obama? He left the nation binder-less when he exited the White House 1,213 days ago.

And because Obama left us in a bind, completely without binders, 88,000 Americans have died.

*

At a press conference Friday, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany wanted to make this all clear. Standing at the podium, she proudly displayed the fruits of three years of labor by Team Trump. Binder one in her left hand! Binder two in her right! Both filled with real ideas about how to handle the COVID-19 crisis! I think she expected reporters and people listening at home to gasp. Team Trump wasn’t slacking off. Not like Team Obama. No way! These fantastic binders—and here she sneered at the work of the previous administration—could be compared to “this thin packet of paper” left behind by the Obama folks, having to do with combating pandemics. She held up the packet gingerly, by one corner, like a dead mouse in a trap, and handed it over to her “assistant, Wendy.”

Only, I didn’t gasp. My first thought: Taxpayers are paying this fool’s salary? And she has an assistant?


For what?

(WATCH THE FIRST MINUTE OF THE CLIP BELOW.)



My second thought was: This is so stupid, it’s hard to know where to begin. We had supposedly learned on Monday, thanks to Sen. Mitch “Zero Charisma” McConnell, that the Obama administration was to blame for the spread of the coronavirus because they failed to leave behind “a game plan” to address pandemics. And what? You thought Team Trump could have come up with a plan of their own in three years! Shows what you know. In a chat with Lara Trump—who probably knows less about pandemics than a panda—Mitch grumbled, “They claim pandemics only happen once every hundred years but what if that’s no longer true? We want to be early, ready for the next one, because clearly the Obama administration did not leave to this administration any kind of game plan for something like this.”

“That’s exactly right,” Lara Trump responded.

Sound of this blogger slapping his forehead, followed by primal scream….

“HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLY F-ING SHIT!”

____________________

“The American public will look to the U.S. government for action when multi-state or other significant events occur.”

Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents
____________________


Mitch wasn’t “exactly right.” He wasn’t even partially right. In fact, by Thursday, even he had to admit he was wrong about what he had claimed.

But his attempt to pin the blame on a previous administration for the blunders (and binders) of Team Trump wouldn’t have made sense even if he had been correct. Even the most obtuse person in the U.S. government—for example, President Trump—should be able to recall the SARS outbreak of 2002. That coronavirus spread to 26 countries. A decade later, the MERS coronavirus erupted in Saudi Arabia and struck across the Middle East. Pandemics don’t happen every hundred years. These threats are no longer rare. MERS struck again in 2015, this time in South Korea.


Trump called Obama a “psycho” during the Ebola outbreak.

If Team Trump didn’t understand that they might face a pandemic threat during their watch, then Team Trump is solely to blame. The Obama administration had to deal with the H1N1 virus in 2009. Then, in 2014, the Ebola virus began to ravage West African. We know Trump knew about that pandemic threat—because he went berserk at the time and said Obama was a “psycho” for the way he handled the crisis. You could even say Trump lost his nerve at the time, predicting that there would be “bedlam” in the streets after President Obama allowed seven infected Americans, who had been working in West Africa, to return home.

In the end, a total of 11 Americans, including those seven, contracted Ebola, and there was no “bedlam” in the streets.

Trump—ever the hater—did say at one point, as Ebola spread:


What's worse? Trump's hate. Or the fact more than 8,000 Americans liked this idea?

*

In fact, as Politico reported in March, the Obama administration did leave behind a 69-page plan titled: “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.” Indeed, as CNN noted at the time, the document “explicitly lists novel coronaviruses as one of the kinds of pathogens that could require a major response.”

The plan is also clear about where ultimate responsibility in a time of pandemic lies:

The U.S. government will use all powers at its disposal to prevent, slow or mitigate the spread of an emerging infectious disease threat. The American public will look to the U.S. government for action when multi-state or other significant events occur.

There’s even more you could say about how the Obama administration tried to prepare the Trump administration.

But if you’re interested, we’ll let you click the link above and you can read the document for yourself.

Something, you can bet, Trump never did.

*

Meanwhile, the toll rises inexorably. As of Friday evening, Johns Hopkins reported the U.S. had 1,442,924 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 87,493 deaths.

Those numbers looked so bad I decided I had better doublecheck the math. The Centers for Disease Control posts new numbers every day. CDC also has numbers that look grim. The figure for May 15 is now up; and on that one day we piled up another 22,977 cases. And on May 14 the U.S. recorded 27,191 new confirmed cases of COVID-19, the worst daily total in a last week.

I’m hoping that figure won’t jump again; but if you remember Trump saying the virus would go away in April, that brought the total for May to 372,652 new cases. That’s more in just 16 days than any other nation on earth has totaled since the crisis began.

A kingdom lost for the loss of a binder, Ben Franklin might have said.


“If we didn’t do any testing we would have very few cases.”

So, let’s end with this nugget from the man we have to pray will lead the nation out of this mess, much of which he made all by himself. Asked by reporters about the alarming numbers of cases the United States has seen, President Trump said this: “When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing we would have very few cases.”

Words of wisdom, from Donald J. Trump.

As we said at the top of today’s post, the stupidity we get from Team Trump is so profound, so all-encompassing, it’s hard to know where to begin or to end.

But, hey!


We have the binders!!!
___





THE ARCHIVE

Donald J. Trump: Leader of the Windmill Party.


April 22-23: Time to face a simple truth. Trump is now the leader of the newly formed Windmill Party. The GOP is extinct; and he can tell the rank and file anything and they will swallow his sentences whole. If he says windmill noise causes cancer, they won’t blink. If he says climate change is a “hoax,” they will nod. If scientists at NASA and NOAA are sounding alarms, they tune them out. If they only believe in Donald J. Trump, there’s no need to think for themselves.

Not to deny that the Windmill Party includes many fine folks. Some of this blogger’s friends, neighbors, and even favorite relatives have been known to vote the Windmill Party line.

That doesn’t mean this party isn’t chock full of nuts. And those nuts drive party policy most of the time. You have the climate change deniers, of course. You also have professional deniers who make millions denying reality. Alex Jones, peddler of both absurd conspiracy theories and expensive coronavirus-curing toothpaste, is one. In this alternative denier universe, Barack Obama was never born in America. The slaughter at Sandy Hook was a “false flag.” The massacre of first graders and teachers wasn’t the work of a screwed up 15-year-old armed with his mother’s AR-15. It was pulled off by the government, so Obama could have an excuse to seize our guns.

Opinion makers in the Windmill Party can’t even handle simple math—and the rank and file are too busy with their daily lives to check the figures out. That means when Sean Hannity claimed 95,000,000 Americans were out of work on the day Obama left office, listeners were justly outraged.

“Justly,” that is,  had that number been even remotely close to the truth.

At a time in history when we need to understand the science of the coronavirus and its spread, we have a political party led by people who believe even the laws of subtraction no longer pertain.

In January, when Trump and his toadies were still bragging about the seven million jobs he had created since taking office, adherents of the Windmill Party line let out a raucous cheer. Trump, himself, never tired of pointing out that the unemployment rate was the lowest in fifty years—which, by the way, this blogger admits was true. After all, this blogger believes in the immutable rules of math.

The problem with Windmill science and math is that windmill noises don’t cause cancer. If you believe it does, you’re following a fool. Nor can you take 95 million unemployed (Candidate Trump pegged the figure at a more modest 93 million), subtract seven million jobs created, and come up with the lowest unemployment in fifty years.

That’s not math.

Now we find ourselves swamped by trouble, in large part due to President Trump’s ability to ignore science. The Windmill faithful believed him when he claimed COVID-19 was like the flu. They weren’t worried. Their hero promised when it got warmer in April the virus would go away. They believed the loudest deniers. They listened when Rush Limbaugh said the coronavirus was “the common cold, folks.” They believed because Rush had warned them about the “four corners of deceit” for years. Those four: government, academia, science, and media.

On an almost daily basis, Limbaugh and others worked to fire up the Windmill base. And the base believed. They listened when Laura Ingraham and Ainsley Earhardt and that whole goofy Fox News crew said there was no need to be alarmed. They took comfort knowing the virus was no threat. The president was nonchalant about taking action to address the spread. Party members assumed the nation was in good hands because they didn’t believe the media if they said we were not. But the nation wasn’t in good hands. The president was a bumbling buffoon.

The four corners of “truth” for Trump and the Windmill Party turned out to be superstition, simplification, bullshit and lies.

*

Nothing this president—or any other—could have kept our country from suffering serious pain. But there was a chance to blunt the spread and limit that pain in the first weeks of the crisis.

That chance was thrown away.

The science was ignored—and now we pay an astronomical price. Today, we learned that 4.4 million more Americans had filed for unemployment. That brings the total for five weeks to 26.5 million.

That is what happens when you compare a virus with some of the characteristics of SARS and MERS (my daughter, who works in infectious diseases at the CDC, just explained the similarities in a phone conversation) to “the common cold, folks.” You don’t act with the urgency you should.

And you pay and pay and pay.

*

We had fresh evidence again yesterday of the damage that can result when deniers lead us in reverse.

Dr. Rick Bright, the director of the federal agency working on a vaccine to fight the virus, released a letter, announcing he had been fired. He said he refused to bend science to fit the president’s whims.

If you haven’t been paying attention, because you’ve been busy trying to figure out how to pay last month’s bills—let alone the bills for this month—you may not realize the president has been touting an almost magical cure for COVID-19. The drug has never been tested for the purpose, but Trump says hydroxychloroquine could be “a gift from god.” He had “a hunch,” he has said, it could work to fight off the virus and he has been pushing hard for its use.

The problem was that the Windmill Party folks were immediately sold. Ingraham made it clear on her nightly show that the drug would be a “game changer” and we could all thank Donald J. Trump. Hannity touted the drug. Tucker Carlson invited a guest on his show who swore that hydroxychloroquine had a “100 percent” cure rate in a clinical trial conducted by Stanford University.

Behind the scenes, Dr. Bright was making it clear he believed the drug would not work—and might well do harm.

What, then, was the sin for which he was fired? Dr. Bright says he was shunted aside because of his “insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit.”

Bah! The Windmill crowd doesn’t trust science! Science is one of the “four corners” of deceit.

In his statement, delivered by his lawyers, Bright said he was “speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science—not politics or cronyism—has to lead the way. Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths,” he added. “Science, in service to the health and safety of the American people, must always trump politics.”

*

For now, we live in a free country, where Dr. Bright can publish his statement and employ the word “trump” in clever fashion. We still enjoy free speech. The New York Times can pick up the story. We still have freedom of the press. Trump might not like it, nor his most avid fans. But we don’t live in China. Yet. In China, of course, they silenced whistleblowers who warned COVID-19 was a threat.

In this country, a reporter—a person President Trump would tell his followers was an “Enemy of the People”—inquired  during the daily press conference: Was Dr. Bright fired for taking a stand?

And in this country, the leader of the Windmill Party could only respond, “Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t; I don’t know who he is.”
___



April 24: A quick check shows that the U.S. has 887,622 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 50,283 Americans are dead.

We have four times as many cases as Spain, the next country on the list, and twice as many dead as Italy, the next worst, and 32.2% of all cases worldwide.




Russia, where Putin has spent weeks denying there was a problem (does that sound familiar?) reported 5,849 new cases in just one day. But Putin is Putin. That means if Russia has nearly 69,000 confirmed cases …

Sure…only 615 people have died. Because in Russia, the “Enemies of the People” say what Putin wants.


Here we have the fatal difference.

Finally, if you scrolled down to 32nd place, sandwiched in between Poland and Romania, you had:



We keep citing this example. South Korea (which has a population one-sixth the size of the United States) discovered it had its first case of COVID-19 on the same day authorities in this country discovered ours, a man who showed up at an urgent care facility in Snohomish County, Washington.

And here we have the fatal difference. In South Korea, government listened to scientists. They took the threat seriously from the start and ramped up testing and quarantining at once.

President Trump and the loudest voices in the Windmill Party (see: 4/22-23/20) downplayed the danger and let the virus explode.
___



April 25-26: At some point in the Trump presidency, I expect my jaw to drop so far, so suddenly, it dislocates, and I end up in the hospital for a week.

Once again, “Disinfectant Don” has bee revealed for what he is: an egocentric, ill-informed liar.

First, however, a look at Sunday’s stark numbers. A check a little before one p.m. shows that the U.S. has 943,865 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. A total of 54,480 Americans are dead.

Given these brutal figures, you might assume it would be easy for President Trump to go before the American people in is daily press conferences and offer up comfort and compassion. But if you have been watching, you know he can’t. He might read a few formulaic sentences off a sheet provided by aides. But there’s never a hint of genuine empathy. The president reads in a monotone, citing cold statistics to show how much help his administration is passing on to states, his voice rising only when he turns defensive. He never mentions individual suffering. He never talks about painful loss. If you watched all of Trump’s press conference, all the way through, you’d never know anyone was suffering except him.

Trump’s troubles exploded again on Thursday when he suggested people with COVID-19 could be cured by injecting them with disinfectant. That comment sounded so stupid that I had a hard time believing the president made it. Anyone who follows my blog, knows I don’t like Trump. I can hardly bear to hear him talk and had not seen the press conference. That meant, I needed to see what he said in context. I had to know. Could a U.S. president really say something so profoundly clueless and dumb?

It turns out he could.

Even worse, when it was revealed how clueless and dumb Trump sounded, he tried to lie about what he meant. He said he wasn’t seriously suggesting injecting disinfectant. He was being “sarcastic.” He was directing his comments toward reporters—who we all know he hates.

By the way, if you’re keeping track, that makes Trump: a) clueless; b) dumb; c) a liar; and d) a threat to the free press.


Still a loyal member of the Windmill Party.

If you’re still a loyal member of the Windmill Party (that is: you believe everything the Orange Moron says), you can see the president’s comments in context, if you watch the briefing, start to end. You can watch it through a fixed White House camera, which focuses on the person at the podium. But since you doubtless have better ways to spend your time, such as picking lint from between your toes, start around the 25:00 minute mark. The pertinent comments last about two minutes.

When Trump turns to pose his question to some person or persons off camera, you can’t see who it might be. It could be a reporter or reporters—as Trump will later claim. It could be the First Lady, stopping by to listen to her main squeeze. For all we know, from this angle, it could be a porn queen.

For proper perspective, you have to view Trump’s comments from another angle, which C-Span2 provides. At the 6:37 mark of their tape, the president suggests that we “hit the body” of a patient suffering from the coronavirus with a powerful dose of ultra-violet light. Maybe even internally! He has a hunch this might knock out the virus. He turns to his right and clearly directs his words to Dr. Deborah Birx, seated in a chair along the the briefing room wall. “And I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it,” he says. He’s obviously directing his comments to her. “And then I see the disinfectant, which knocks it out, in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside, or almost a cleaning?” he continues. He even waves his hand in a circular motion, as if cleaning an Oval Office window. “Because you see it gets in the lungs, and does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So that you’re going to have to use medical doctors. But it sounds interesting to me.”

Trump ends with a shrug.

And if that’s sarcasm directed at reporters, I’m the Princess of York. You can see where Trump is looking (screenshot at 7:02). It’s clear to Dr. Birx who he’s talking to, as well, because she answers his questions

If you still have your doubts about the veracity of this blogger, you can go to a third tape and watch Dr. Birx respond.



*

It was bad enough to see that the President of the United States didn’t understand simple science. Friday it got worse. Most Americans know lying comes naturally to Trump. Fish have got to swim. Dogs have got to woof.  The man has got to lie.

First, Trump had Kayleigh McEnany, his new press secretary and an adept liar in her own right, issue a statement. She insisted the boss had been misquoted by the jackals of the free press. “President Trump has repeatedly said that Americans should consult with medical doctors regarding coronavirus treatment, a point that he emphasized again during yesterday’s briefing,” the statement read. “Leave it to the media to irresponsibly take President Trump out of context and run with negative headlines.”

Yes! When Trump said injecting disinfectant might cure the disease, go with the positive headlines!

BLEACH SALES THROUGH THE ROOF: U.S. ECONOMY REBOUNDS

Blistering criticism from just about everyone with a functioning central nervous system did not abate, in part because almost no one believes what anyone working as Press Secretary for this president says. So, as we’ve already noted, Trump tried to claim that he was being sarcastic all along.

It was not lost on keen observers, that Trump was now arguing that he hadn’t been misquoted—just misunderstood.

____________________

It “can cause death and very adverse outcomes.”

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner
____________________


Sadly, no one caught the sarcasm—because there was no sarcasm to be caught. The manufacturer of Lysol and other top-selling disinfectants decided it was time to issue stern warning. “As a global leader in health and hygiene products,” the company statement read, “we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route).”

The CDC also decided to tweet:


  
The Environmental Protection Agency felt the need to share a similar don’t drink the bleach message: “Never apply the product to yourself or others. Do not ingest disinfectant products.”

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, Trump’s own former FDA commissioner, was equally direct. “I think we need to speak very clearly that there’s no circumstance under which you should take a disinfectant or inject a disinfectant for the treatment of anything, and certainly not for the treatment of coronavirus.” For good measure, he added, “There’s absolutely no circumstance under which that’s appropriate, and it can cause death and very adverse outcomes.”


You’d be “better off with coronavirus.”

Trump’s initial stupidity and subsequent lying were met with scorn. “These [disinfectant] products have corrosive properties that melt or destroy the lining of our innards,” McGill University thoracic surgeon Dr. Jonathan Spicer warned. Dr. Donna Farber, an immunologist at Columbia University was appalled by Trump’s suggestion that we might use ultraviolet (UV) light to kill the virus. The idea, she said, was “not practical.” UV rays don’t go deep enough. The rays would  never get to the lungs. But you could suffer DNA damage. Dr. Farber was blunt. Any radiation that would penetrate deeply enough “would cause so much damage” that you’d be “better off with coronavirus.”

The more you looked for reaction—to ensure you were getting the story in full—the more harsh condemnation piled up. “Inhaling chlorine bleach would be absolutely the worst thing for the lungs,” warned John Balmes, a San Francisco pulmonologist. “Not even a low dilution of bleach or isopropyl alcohol is safe. It’s a totally ridiculous concept.”

“This is one of the most dangerous and idiotic suggestions made so far in how one might actually treat COVID-19,” a British expert told U.S. News and World Report. “It is hugely irresponsible because, sadly, there are people around the world who might believe this sort of nonsense and try it out for themselves.”

Finally, Dr. Vin Gupta, a global health policy expert, told NBC News:

This notion of injecting or ingesting any type of cleansing product into the body is irresponsible, and it’s dangerous...It’s a common method that people utilize when they want to kill themselves...Any amount of bleach or isopropyl alcohol or any kind of common household cleaner is inappropriate for ingestion even in small amounts. Small amounts are deadly.

Gupta said he found watching the president’s press conferences “demoralizing.” He was horrified to think Trump’s loyal listeners might trust in what he offered as advice. “It’s exceptionally dangerous,” Dr. Gupta warned.  There were people “who hang on to every word” the president says.


Postscript. I mentioned the president’s lack of empathy near the start of today’s post. To my knowledge, I have never heard him use the word in any speech, although I have trouble listening to him for very long.

I do know, if you check the archive for his Twitter feed you can search by word. You have, for starters, nearly 48,000 tweets. Punch in “losers” and you find Trump has called his foes “losers” hundreds of times. He has called those he doesn’t like “psychos” and “sick” and “lowlifes,” too.

I had never searched to see how often the word “empathy” is used. It turned up in two tweets—including Trump retweeting Dan Bongino, of Fox News, who had this to say: “I don’t feel an ounce of empathy for all of the imbeciles who bought into the Russian collusion hoax now that it’s been entirely debunked.”

The second time the word appeared it had nothing to do with Trump thinking about others. All he really did was quote a White House Proclamation on Doctors Day, and provide a link.

So: I would argue that the word “empathy” has never been a part of Trump’s vocabulary. Nor does he display any in his daily life.
___


April 27: If you missed this potentially positive development in the COVID-19 story, you can consider yourself excused. My oldest daughter, who works in infectious diseases at the Centers for Disease Control, tipped me off to a study done by USC and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. Unlike guests on Fox News, my girl Abby, almost always knows what she’s talking about.

Based on a representative sampling of 863 county residents, they estimate that as many as 4.1% of the adult population already had antibody protection against the coronavirus in early April. That would mean far more people had been infected than health officials or even those infected knew.

At the time, Los Angeles County had 7,994 confirmed cases and 600 deaths. That would appear to be a fearful mortality rate of 7.5%. But if the sampling figure held up, the county would have already had between 221,000 and 442,000 cases of the virus. Selecting even the lowest figure, the mortality rate would be .003 percent, or 1 death for every 368 cases. That would be similar to an exceptionally virulent strain of seasonal flu—proving President Knucklehead was partly right when he said COVID-19 was “like the flu.”

So, I asked Abby if this meant we were safer than we realized. “Yes, and no,” she explained. “This virus is far more communicable than flu.” She also said the coronavirus was not like the flu. It was similar in its structure to SARS and MERS—which had proven highly deadly in the past.

I listened attentively. Smart kid. I didn’t understand everything she said. But there did seem to be a ray of hope amidst the gloom.

Anyway, there may be other signs of hope. New tests indicate that 96% of 3,277 inmates in Ohio, Virginia, Arkansas and North Carolina who have tested positive for the disease were asymptomatic.

“It adds to the understanding that we have a severe undercount of cases in the U.S.,” Leana Wen, adjunct associate professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University, explained.

It also means the death rates we see—which look frightful, to say the least—may be not as bad as they appear.

That would be welcome news.

____________________

“He was soberly addressing health experts on the coronavirus task force, urging them to launch a study.”

Fox News
____________________


Generally speaking, however, the Trump administration—led by a dimwit president—continues to bumble and stumble along. Poison control centers have seen spikes in calls after the man with the “very, very large brain” suggested injecting disinfectant might protect a person from the virus. Kentucky officials say calls related to misuse of household cleaners rose 50% in March, even before the president leaped aboard the Lysol bandwagon and rode it until it broke loose and went flying down a steep hill and smashed into a scientific tree. Even Fox News seemed to have had its fill of the president’s unshakeable idiocy. Since there are still a few journalists working for Fox, they reported that while Trump claimed to have been speaking sarcastically when he touted the virus-fighting glories of disinfectant, “he was soberly addressing health experts on the coronavirus task force, urging them to launch a study.” The Maryland Emergency Management Agency said it had received a hundred calls in the wake of Trump’s comments. Health officials decided it was time to issue an advisory: “This is a reminder that under no circumstances should any disinfectant product be administered into the body through injection, ingestion or any other route.” The State of Washington also saw a spike in disinfectant-related health emergencies. Again, health authorities were forced to plead with citizens not to “drink bleach” or “inject disinfectant.”

*

Meanwhile, the president wasted his entire weekend (with no official events on his schedule Saturday or Sunday) and spent his time roasting and toasting foes on Twitter. Among other issues, he was infuriated by a story in The New York Times, which mocked his work habits. The president proceeded to prove he was focused on critical issues confronting the nation by firing off 45 tweets on Sunday. He started off well enough, wishing the First Lady a “Happy Birthday.”


“The hardest working President in history.”

After that, you had a barrage of wild posts, punctuated by presidential self-pity. Trump insisted (again) that he hadn’t left the White House “in months,” except to send off the hospital ship Comfort. He said the story in the Times was the work of “a third rate reporter who knows nothing about me.” He went that one better, claiming people who did know him “say that I am the hardest working President in history. I don’t know about that,” he continued, “but I am a hard worker and have probably gotten more done in the first 3 1/2 years than any President in history.”

Poor Donald soon turned his focus to the crushing dilemma of 26.5 million Americans who had lost their jobs in five weeks.

Or not.

Trump was all warmed up by afternoon and started blasting reporters at papers like the Times, who had won “Noble” prizes “for their work on Russia, Russia, Russia, only to have been proven totally wrong.” (They weren’t wrong, by the way.) He said they should have to give those Noble prizes to…Trump took a moment to hit the CAPS button …“REAL REPORTERS & JOURNALISTS.”

Don proved he was focused on dying Americans…by howling about mean reporters some more. “Lawsuits should be brought against all,” said the man who dreams of dealing with the press the same way his friends Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un and Prince Mohammed bin Salman do. (Calling those three “friends” is, in itself, a sad statement about what kind of man sits in the White House today.) Lawsuits? Yes, sue them all, “including the Fake News Organizations, to rectify this terrible injustice. For all of the great lawyers out there, do we have any takers? When will the Noble Committee Act? Better be fast!”

Yes, forget the 50,000 plus dead. The real victim of “terrible injustice” in this sad time is Trump.

The Twittersphere can be a cruel place, of course, and Trump was roundly mocked for repeatedly misspelling “Noble” prize.

Then—honest to god—the President of the United States spent even more of his precious time claiming he was being “sarcastic” when he typed “Nobel” wrong. I mean…Jesus H. Christ.

You could probably argue at this point that the Narcissist-in-Chief is falling apart while we all watch. He spent most of Sunday on the attack. He blasted the “RINO Paul Ryan,” the “fraud” Donna Brazile, and described Chris Wallace, on Fox News, as “nastier to Republicans than even Deface the Nation or Sleepy Eyes” Chuck Todd. Trump dug up and retweeted a number of tweets by others he liked. “John Brennan Hid Evidence Putin Favored Hillary in 2016,” read one. Pelosi was a “serial fraudster, & generational corruptocrat,” said another. The sister of General Flynn claimed her brother “Was Framed By His Own Government!!” Then, for good measure, she added the hashtag, “#HumanScum.”

Then, for fuck sakes, the President of the United States thought it was a great idea to retweet a doctored film clip of Joe Biden, his tongue lolling out like a cow, apparently trying to speak.

I, for one, was appalled.


A busy schedule.


I don’t know how we ever ended up with a president so petty and lacking in class. I don’t know how his fans continue to ignore his love for authoritarians, his attacks on the free press, and his disinterest in studying the issues related to the COVID-19 threat. I do know this. If I was president, I’d not waste an entire weekend tweeting and retweeting idiotic crap. I’d have aides connect me by phone to the crew of the U.S.S. Kidd. The destroyer had been stationed off the coast of South American, tasked with interdicting drug smuggling, including working to thwart drug cartels that have been building their own mini-submarines. At least 33 sailors aboard the Kidd had tested positive for COVID-19. I’d have spent my time thanking them for their sacrifice and promising to get them whatever they might need.

I’d spend part of my Sunday boning up on documents related to possible reinstatement of Captain Brett Crozier, who warned that infection was sweeping the crew of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt.

I’d be on the phone with the U.S. Navy’s top admiral, who favors returning Crozier to command.

I would tell the admiral to get it done.

If I were president, I might kick back awhile and see how my favorite NFL team did in the 2020 draft. (My team, the Cincinnati Bengals, had an  excellent haul, if anyone cares.) But then I’d tell aides, “You know what, let’s get the numbers for people who have lost jobs. Let’s get the number for Amy, who works in the plumbing department of Home Depot in Sacramento and still shows up every day for work despite the risk of infection. And Gina, the Costo checkout lady in Cincinnati. And Amanda, the nurse practitioner on the front lines in Chicago. Let’s get Sean, the high school teacher, who lost his mother to the disease on the phone.

I would call them up and offer words of consolation, as best I could. That’s how I’d spend my weekend, if I was in charge.

Then again, I use the word “empathy” a great deal. And I’m not Trump.
___



4/28/20: We should check in and see how the Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) is going. This plan was created to help save America’s small businesses during the coronavirus shutdown. The most any company was supposed to receive under the program was a $10 million loan, at 1% interest. Small businesses were defined as having 500 workers or less. But it turns out the Trump/McConnell plan, which handed out $349 billion in the first round, had a few fatal flaws. Yesterday, the second round kicked off with another $310 billion to give to small businesses in need.

*

I believe it will be clear to you after you take a little quiz, why Trump worked so hard to get rid of the Inspector General who would have had oversight over how that PPP funding was distributed.

ARE YOU SMARTER THAN THE PRESIDENT?

(Circle the correct answer or answers.)

1.     The Los Angeles Lakers applied for and received a $10 million PPP loan. The Lakers franchise was recently valued at $4.4 billion. Since only five employees can be on the court at one time, this small business obviously needed a loan to survive.   TRUE   FALSE

2.     AutoNation, with more than 300 outlets nationwide, filed PPP requests from multiple outlets and received $77 million. Up in heaven, Wayne Huizenga smiled to see the company he founded in 1996 had been saved by taxpayer largess. In 2018, when he died, Huizenga was worth a cool $2.8 billion. Bill Gates owns a 16% stake in the company, so you know AutoNation needed rescuing by taxpayers like you and me.   TRUE   FALSE

3.     Ashford Inc. has 130 properties around the country. Last year the company was valued at $5 billion. Ashford is what a reasonable person would think of when thinking “small business.”   TRUE   FALSE

4.     Ashford filed for multiple loans through subsidiaries. Total received: $60 million. Ashford deserved that cash more than your local bakery, for example, that employed eleven people and asked for $44,000, which bakery got shut out in round one—because money ran out.   TRUE   FALSE

5.     Ashford is owned by Monty J. Bennett. His compensation in 2018 came to $6,094,056. He did have two bad years, earning a measly $5,732,750 in 2017 and scrimping by in 2016, on $4,365,333. Bennett had no way to bail out his business except those PPP loans.   TRUE   FALSE

6.     It would be lots of fun to know if the Trump Organization filed for and received PPP loans.   TRUE   FALSE

7.     They probably did. (This is not a question, though.)

8.     Ruth’s Hospitality Group (RHG), which runs Ruth Chris Steak Houses, had revenue of $468 million in 2019, and a profit of $42 million. RHG managed to snag a pair of $10 million loans. RHG needed the cash in order to keep paying their CEO’s a living wage. As in $13.5 million over a period of three years. (That was for 2015-2017.) Or $6.1 million to Cheryl Henry, who took over as CEO in 2018. Taxpayers should be proud to bail company shareholders and CEO’s out.   TRUE   FALSE

9.     There is no way executives at RHG could have taken less compensation in the past and set aside money for rough times like this.   TRUE   FALSE

10. Quantum, which specializes in computer storage devices, said it received a $10 million PPP loan. As CBS has noted, “Quantum is 16% owned by a $500 million investment firm that specializes in buyouts.” CEO Jamie Lerner was paid nearly $2.3 million in 2019. As a taxpayer, you have to be feeling good about helping Quantum out.   TRUE   FALSE

11. Nothing says “saving American jobs” like loaning money to a company that specializes in buyouts.   TRUE   FALSE

12. The Fiesta Restaurant Group, which had $660.9 million in sales last year, and employs 10,480 people, got the max loan. Fiesta clearly qualified as a business with 500 employees or less.   TRUE   FALSE

13. Hallador Energy, a coal-mining operation with $317.4 million in sales and 915 employees, got a loan. In March the company announced the permanent closure of its mine in Carlisle, Indiana and a “reduction in force” involving sixty workers. “Our hearts go out to our co-workers who are affected by this action, and we are grateful to them for their dedication and service,” CFO Lawrence D. Martin said at the time. “We regret the impact that will be felt by their families and the community.” As in: This mine is permanently closed. Therefore, Hallador deserves a loan.   TRUE   FALSE

14. Shake Shack, a national fast food chain, had $100 million in cash on hand when it applied for a loan. As soon as the PPP program was up and running, Shake Shack elbowed its way to the front of the line and received $10 million. Shake Shack had no other choice than to ask for a loan.   TRUE   FALSE

15. Broadwind Energy, which constructs giant wind towers, received a loan, but for only $9.5 million. That sucks for them.   TRUE   FALSE

16. President Trump has said that windmill noise causes cancer. Loaning Broadwind money is part of a plot to kill unsuspecting Americans.   TRUE   FALSE.

17. Windmill noise does not cause cancer. Only an idiot would say that they it does.   TRUE   FALSE

18. The Washington Post filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Small Business Administration (SBA), seeking a list of all companies that received PPP funds. SBA closed the request without providing information. This proves that reporters are “Enemies of the People.”   TRUE   FALSE

19. Monday morning, at 10:30, the second round of PPP loans was made available. Minutes later the system crashed. This shows we should definitely elect Donald J. Trump again.   TRUE   FALSE

20.  Based on previous evidence, you should probably be worried about the way the Trump administration is dealing with this crisis because ___.
A)    Health and Human Services Director Alex Azar chose a former breeder of Labradoodles to head up the HHS coronavirus response.
B)     The White House aide in charge of hiring for many positions is President Trump’s 29-year-old former body servant. He got fired from one White House job in 2018, reportedly due to a drinking and gambling problem.
C)    Trump’s first choice to head the EPA got canned after it was revealed he used his security detail to drive him around Washington D.C. so he could find his favorite hand soap.
D)   Trump believes the human body can produce only a limited amount of energy over a lifetime. Once you burn some it cannot be replaced.
E)     This explains why the president looks like a 239-pound blob of cookie dough wearing pants.
F)     All of the above.

Answers: 1. Amazingly false! 2. False. 3. False. 4. False. 5. False. 6. True. 7. ---. 8. False. 9. False. 10. False. 11. False. 12. Good Lord: Mathematically false. 13. False.  14. False. 15. Sort of true. 16. False (trick question, because when Trump said that he was talking science nonsense); 17. True. 18. False (if you marked “True” you get the Dunce Cap and have to sit in a corner until the next election passes). 19. False. 

20. All of the above.


Seriously? We got a PPP loan? 

*

During another one of his interminable press conferences, Trump claimed, when asked by reporters, that the U.S. would soon be able to test five million people per day for the virus.

Or, as Trump put it, “We’ll be there very soon.”

Since the greatest number of tests performed in one day, so far, had been 314,182, this prediction seemed—shall we say—overly optimistic. But when reporters asked the Maestro of Misinformation to clarify his answer, he replied, “If you look at the numbers, it could be that we’re getting very close.”

Unfortunately, earlier that day, Admiral Brett Giroir, the man in charge of the federal government’s testing response, said “there is absolutely no way on Earth, on this planet or any other planet” that we could be doing five million tests a day, maybe ever.

Okay. Not getting close.
___



April 29: Knowing that 30.3 million Americans had filed for unemployment in six weeks, it was jarring to hear Boy Wonder Jared Kushner give offer his assessment of  the situation. If you missed it—because you were trying to log on to your state system and file for jobless relief—Kushner said he would call the Trump administration’s handling of the virus threat “a great success story.”

*

What else have we learned in just the last few days? We learned that whereas April is fast disappearing, the coronavirus is not, even though the Maestro of Misinformation, once predicted, in April, it would.

We learned this week that the U.S. economy shrank by 4.8% in the first quarter of 2020. But the Maestro told everyone he wasn’t worried at all. Even though economists warn that second quarter damage will be devastating, the president insisted, “We’re heartened that the worst of the pain and suffering is going to be behind us.” Trump also said he thought the “new normal” was going to be great and as of May 1, he said federal social distancing guidelines would be lifted. “I see the new normal being what it was three months ago,” he added.


“It will go down to zero, ultimately.”

Next, reporters pinned Trump down. Now that the U.S. had surpassed a million cases of the coronavirus, they wondered. Had he been babbling when he said on February 26 that we had only a few cases and would soon have fewer? “When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done,” he famously said.

No, the president insisted. He wasn’t babbling. He was right!! “It will go down to zero, ultimately,” he said.

You could argue—I guess—that if the entire population of the planet was wiped out by the coronavirus, we’d be down to zero, ultimately, too.
___



April 30: This is Team Trump we are dealing with, where you can say literally anything and later claim you did not.

Or you did, but you were being “sarcastic.”

And that meant White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany was busy on the last day of April, insisting that Jared didn’t sound as stupid as people with normal hearing thought he did when he said the Trump administration was writing “a great success story” in how it was handling the coronavirus crisis.

I think Jared has been taken entirely out of context,” she sneered when reporters inquired. (McEnany’s default expression is a sneer.) Kushner was talking about “a great success story” involving ventilators, she sneered again. Team Trump had produced a ventilator for every American who needed one—and possibly spares to keep in garages. “Not a single American died in this country for lack of a ventilator,” McEnany sneered once again. “I would call that response a success.”

Yes, tens of thousands of dead. Who wouldn’t call that a success?

*

McEnany’s boss, the Maestro of Misinformation himself, was busy too on the last day of the month, reshaping reality in an effort to make himself look good. Asked again by reporters about a failure to ramp up testing for COVID-19 in time, Trump laid the blame at the feet of…holy, fuck…President Obama! “We started off with empty cupboards,” he complained. “The last administration left us with nothing. We started off with bad, broken tests, and obsolete tests.” But his administration was the best! They were coming up with fantastic tests, whereas Obama did nothing. That bastard! That Kenya guy!

“I think we’ve done a really great job,” Trump continued, in self-congratulatory fashion.

Jim Acosta, Trump’s favorite press foil, the reporter the Maestro most likes to insult, asked logically how the Obama administration could leave behind broken tests—for a virus that didn’t exist back in 2017, the last time Mr. Obama was in charge.


$1,673,972,602.73 every day

An individual tethered even tenuously to the truth would have been stumped by that query. Trump never blinked. First, he repeated his line about bad, broken, no-good-rotten-Obama-testing. Then he talked about H1N1 swine flu and how the previous administration’s handling of that outbreak was “a disaster.” (No one had a chance to ask what the H1N1 outbreak had to do with the situation today, eleven years later.) From there it was on to ammunition. Trump singing his favorite hits, claiming once more, that when he came to Washington, the U.S. military barely had enough bullets to stop a bank robbery. There was no telling what bullets had to do with the COVID-19 virus. But this was the Maestro in action. You expected a heavy percentage of BS and lying. And you had to wonder. If the U.S. military had $611 billion to spend in 2016, or, to be precise: $1,673,972,602.73 every day, under President Obama, how come they couldn’t afford ammo?

Since Trump was replaying all his favorite tunes, he decided to attack the free press for fun. “I have to say it,” he continued, “because the news is so fake and so corrupt, I think we did a spectacular job.”

Spectacular.

Sure.
___



Tens of thousands dead; U.S. economy in shambles.

May 1, 2020: The coronavirus death toll on the first morning in May stood at 63,019 Americans.

But in Press Secretary McEnany’s eyes, this was a success story because none of those many thousands died “for lack of a ventilator.” No doubt that knowledge made grieving family and friends feel better.
___





May 2: With the death toll rising it has become cliché to note that more Americans have been killed by the coronavirus than died during the Vietnam War.

By Saturday morning, however, as numbers climbed, you had to add all soldiers and sailors who died during the Spanish-American War and the American Revolution, in order to have an accurate comparison. 


____________________

Plus 434,234 hours of overtime.
____________________

Of course, since members of the Trump family never don the uniform to serve this country and generally die in comfy beds at advanced ages, it was no surprise to hear a billionaire president order meatpacking plants to stay open and keep producing pork chops and bacon for public consumption.

If workers fell ill, frankly, Trump didn’t care. Whereas, he was alarmed to think stock market investors were falling ill as they watched portfolios shrivel. And the president was deeply worried about not being re-elected.

Stuck at home, with nothing much to do on a shutdown Saturday in spring, I set to work to check into the matter. Like nurses and doctors, and Amazon warehouse employees, and checkout workers at Costco and Walmart, men and women who toil cutting up chicken and beef in this country find themselves on the front lines during this crisis. They have to keep the supply chain open—and they have been infected in shocking numbers. For this privilege, slaughterhouse workers and people making sausage earn a mean wage of $13.68 per hour.

In Trumpistan, where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is busy filling the federal bench with pro-business judges, I believe this “proves” we should never raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour. If we did the people who run and own Tyson Foods, one of the giants in the business ($40 billion in annual sales), might have to cut back on yacht-buying activities. Take Noel White, CEO of the company. In 2019 he took home $8,939,938 in salary and other compensation. That would equal 2,080 hours of work (40 hours per week for 52 weeks) at $13.68, for an annual salary of $28,454.

Plus 434,234 hours of overtime.

John Tyson, the owner of the company, is worth $2.1 billion. In fact, Forbes estimates that in one day last week, Mr. Tyson lost $34 million as a result of declines in the stock market. For perspective, it would take an ordinary worker at one of his plants 1,194 years, nine months, to earn that much money.

It figures, then, that a soulless billionaire like Donald J. Trump would think nothing of ordering low-paid employees back to work, despite the fact that they often catch and spread the virus on the job. Which means they are prone to keel over dead. Four Tyson employees have already died in Georgia, including Annie Grant, 55, who had called in sick, but was told by managers to report back to work. Two more were dead and 92 infected at a plant in Illinois. Two dead and 148 infected in Iowa.

Seventy-six sick in Kentucky.

Eight infected in Maine.

“Several” infected at a Tyson plant in Wilkesboro, N.C.

Ninety at a plant in Tennessee.

A worker at a Texas plant tested positive for COVID-19, but plant officials decided not to notify co-workers for two weeks.

Another 125 ill, one dead in Washington.

And 890 out of 2,200 employees at a plant in Indiana, confirmed positive.


Conspiring to depress wages.

Nor should we forget. Tyson was one of several large meatpacking companies sued by the federal government in 2019, and accused of conspiring to keep wages low for what is a predominantly immigrant labor force. According to the suit, officials from several of the big corporations held “off the books” meetings at a resort in Destin, Florida and set “artificially depressed” wages for workers. Industry lobbyists even paid for hotel rooms and seafood dinners for state officials.

Those officials then winked at any labor violations they might have found—if they had bothered to look.

Finally, as an added bonus, a raid on poultry processing plants in Mississippi in August 2019 vacuumed up 680 undocumented workers.

You could get more Americans to do this type of work, of course. Only, you’d have to pay more than the average wage of $12.27 in Mississippi.

Low as that is, it does top Alabama. There, you could develop carpal tunnel syndrome while cutting up chicken—and now, maybe, you could contract a deadly virus—all for $10.90 per hour.
___


May 3: The Trump administration continues to write a “glorious record,” as the nation reopens for business.

Sunday afternoon, a check of the John Hopkins University website indicates the U.S. has 1,154,621 confirmed cases of COVID-19. It’s hard to think that back on February 26, the president predicted we were heading for zero cases, and bragged because no American had died.

As of today, the toll stands at 67,451.


The Maestro is off just a shade.

Your favorite blogger has fallen behind in his posts. So we’re doing catch up today. Last week the Maestro of Misinformation was busy bragging that under his guiding hand the United States was killing on testing. According to Trump, people in every other country dreamed of having a bold orange leader like him. At one point he insisted the U.S. had done more tests for the COVID-19 virus than all other countries combined.

If we go to Worldometers, we find that the Maestro is off just a shade. True, the U.S. has done more tests than any other nation.

We’ve done 7.2 million. Spain has done 1.9 million, Italy 2.2 million and the United Kingdom 1.2 million tests. If we add in France, 1.1 million, Germany, 2.6 million—okay, that’s already more than we’ve done—and then we add Russia, 4.1 million—and we start totaling numbers for the rest of the world in our head and get 17.5 million more.

Okay, the Maestro is full of shit.

*

We do know, without a doubt, that many states are opening back up. We can hope, whether we like Trump or whether we do not, that the country recovers with some sort of speed.

We also know that as of this morning, the Trump toadies are out in force, insisting that when the story of this time is finally written, historians will credit this president for a great success. “When history looks back on this,” Jared Kushner claims, “they’ll say, man, the federal government acted really quickly and creatively, they threw a lot at the problem and saved a lot of lives.”

(Wait, didn’t these very same guys spend weeks telling us, “Don’t worry, this virus is just the flu?”)

And, here, it might be worth offering this chart, to show what happened when South Korea and the U.S. discovered the same day, they had their first case of the virus. The South started immediate testing.

Trump kept denying there was any reason for concern.


Total cases.

                                    South Korea                           United States

January 20                         1                                        1
March 2                         3,276                                    104     
March 5                         6,284                                    225
March 7                         7,000+                                            401
March 17                       8,320                                   4,661

By March 21, South Korea had already done 300,000 tests for the coronavirus. The U.S., with six times the population, had done 170,000. The cost of delay was soon perfectly clear.

March 29                       9,661                                 137,294
April 6                          10,331                                337,971
April 24                        10,708                                887,622
May 3                           10,793                              1,186,073          

South Korea had contained the spread, at a cost of only 250 lives.


Postscript: Speaking of South Korea, troops recently traded fire with enemy forces across the border in North Korea.

Kim Jong-un, who some reports said was dead, has resurfaced. Three years, four months into Trump’s first term in office (hopefully, his only one) the North Korean dictator still has all the nuclear weapons he had when our president told us he was no longer a nuclear threat.


In fact, Kim has more.


One easy way to tell: This was never the flu.
____


May 4-5: Where to even begin? The COVID-19 death toll continues to rise and—good god—our president is just nuts.

You would think the most powerful narcissist in the world could have aides check his math. Or he could eyeball the same statistics this blogger sees and not tweet stupid shit.

Typically, yesterday, we got this:




We are, if fact, #1 in most tests performed of any country, but we are still significantly behind if we adjust for population. The U.S. has done 22,612 tests per million. Germany has done more than 30,000. And Germany, with a population equal to one fourth of ours, has one tenth the loss of life. Many nations are testing higher percentages of their populations. That would include Belgium, Russia, Portugal, Ireland and Switzerland. Just one border away, Canada is testing at higher rates than we are under the guiding orange hand of Donald J. Trump. Their death rate is half as high.


Two words you will never hear the president say.

Still, we can celebrate (a tiny bit) as the country begins opening back up. The real question: at what cost, and to whom? Dr. Fauci made it clear last night in an interview on CNN that he feared we were relaxing social distancing rules too soon—and we’d only see the spread of the virus accelerate again. “I have a moral obligation,” he said, to sound warning. (Add those words, “moral obligation” to the list of words you will never hear President Trump utter, not even if you could listen to him talk in his sleep.)

We find ourselves on an uncharted course—steered erratically by a president who compares himself to Captain Bligh. You know: the commander of the HMS Bounty, so hated by his crew that they mutinied and set him and a handful of others adrift in a small boat. And we never know who is at risk.

Consider the case of a Walmart store in Worcester, Massachusetts. On April 1, it was discovered that one employee was infected. By Wednesday, last week, a total of 23 had tested positive. Sunday, that number grew again, with news that 58 additional workers had COVID-19.

On an oddly positive note, Missouri health officials report that 373 workers at one meatpacking plant have been infected by the coronavirus—but all 373 were found to be asymptomatic.

So: the question continues to boggle the minds of even the best scientists. How deadly is this strain?

In total, Missouri reports 8,386 cases and 352 deaths. So, barring mass testing, the death rate, from what numbers we have, would be 4.2% in the “Show Me State.”

Lately, it has become Trump-fan gospel to insist health experts are lying about how many cases of the virus there have been and how many deaths. It’s part of some plot to bring the Orange God down. One right-wing media outlet trumpeted the news that deaths from the virus had gone down—dramatically—in the last two weeks. On Twitter, Tim Young, a right-wing personality, picked up the story and ran with it. “HOLY SHIT: Did I read this wrong or did the CDC just revised [sic] the national COVID-19 deaths to 37,308?!?!”

Then his right-wing fans sprinted with the tall tale. Young garnered more than 12,000 retweets. The “RINO governor” of Massachusetts, one of Young’s followers responded, was in on the plot. Another suggested that inflating the threat meant “big money for hospitals.” “I guess democrats haven’t figured out a way to politicize pneumonia,” a third grumbled. Another respondent had the whole scheme figured out. “Flu death numbers way down from normal,” he or she said, “and way way down from a bad flu year. So, we essentially borrowed from the flu column, put it in the covid column.”

Soon Trump fans were running a marathon with the shocking numbers they had uncovered. The CDC had been lying all along. Those dirty bastard health officials!!!

*

So, this humble blogger kept checking. Would Republican-controlled states, for example, inflate their numbers?

That would defy logic.

We know red-state Texas was among the most reluctant jurisdictions to shut down and one of the first to open back up. So, would they lie about their own numbers? On Monday, the Texas Department of State Health Services reported there were 31,548 infections in Texas and 867 fatalities. Today, the numbers stand at 32,332 and 884. If you start clicking on counties, you learn Presidio, down on the Rio Grande, hasn’t had a case. Briscoe, up in the Panhandle, has one. But Harris County has nearly 7,000.

(Texas officials are also reporting that as of today 1,577 people are hospitalized as a result of coronavirus infections.)

Texas health officials aren’t faking numbers; but the nearly impossible tightrope walk all states face is clear. If Texas opens up Hudspeth County (0 cases) and people from El Paso County (998 cases) are allowed to travel to Hudspeth, which borders to the east, to come to cafes and bars and hair salons—do you kick off a new round of infection?

There can be no doubt: the economic pain being felt is immense and still growing. But no other state wants to end up looking like New York.

In Texas, then, you have the centaur approach. Half open, half closed. The governor has allowed all retail stores, restaurants, and movie theaters to reopen. You can now go to museums and libraries, too. But occupancy will be limited to 25% of what was previously listed. Essential services remain open. That means, if you get infected at the theater, you can go cough on a grocery store clerk. But you still cannot go sweat at the gym or swim in a public pool. You cannot get a tattoo or have innocent body parts pierced. You cannot get a massage, no matter how tense this crisis is making you feel. You can’t get your hair done and you can’t go to a bowling alley. And, my lord, you can’t go to bars.

Two states which moved to shut down quickly, Ohio and Washington, have fared well. Georgia—where the governor admitted he didn’t realize asymptomatic persons could transmit the disease—has, like Texas, moved up steadily on the list of states with the most infections and has not flattened any curve. Another 766 Georgians were found to have the coronavirus on May 4.

Also climbing up the ladder of reported coronavirus cases: Florida, with 37,439 and 1,471 deaths. On March 14, the state reported only 38 new cases for the day. By April 1, the explosion had occurred—with 1,032 new cases in just 24 hours. So, while there seems to be a slight downward trend of late, the spread is clearly continuing: 



CDC is clear: 67,456 dead from COVID-19.

As for CDC and those “revised” numbers, Trump supporters were trumpeting? As of May 4, the number given for COVID-19 deaths was pretty clear: 67,456, including an increase of 1,719 from the day before.

By Sunday night, even Trump was fudging his bets, admitting during a talk on Fox News, “We’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people. That’s a horrible thing. We shouldn’t lose one person out of this.”

But his latest prediction was a far cry from his claim eleven weeks ago, that we had only 15 cases in this country, no one had died, and we were headed for zero soon. Because he was the greatest president ever. By far!

So close. So close, Disinfectant Donald. Plus, now we have “murder hornets” to worry about.

According to tracking by CDC, we’ve been piling up roughly 30,000 new cases per day, even as most states start opening back up.



___


May 6-7: It’s time to face hard facts. If you listen to President Trump and believe what he spews, you are actually ending up dumber. This week, for example, he said he was going to disband his Coronavirus Task Force because…who knows why? The next day he announced he wasn’t going to disband his Task Force because…who knows why?

Not even Disinfectant Donald.

Yesterday, to “prove” he was doing an awesome job, Trump tweeted the following graph. And, look, you have probably heard the old line: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” But, Jesus H. Christ. Trump combines them all, telling lies and damned lies, buttressed by statistics.

Sadly, more than 73,000 Trump fans “liked” the graph and more than 22,000 retweeted it, spreading the dumbness far and wide.

Trump even added a little whining to go with his lies:

For the constant criticism from the Do Nothing Democrats and their Fake News partners, here is the newest chart on our great testing “miracle” compared to other countries. Dems and LameStream Media should be proud of the USA, instead of always ripping us down!


So, there, on the face of it, it was. It was a “miracle” what Trump and his administration had done. Look at that graph!!!!


Lies, damned lies, and Trump's statistics.

But you don’t have to become dumber, if you’re an avid Trump fan. You can check the president’s math, which is often off by factors of ten or a hundred. In reality—a place where Trump is reluctant to ever tread—you could go to the same source and create a chart using the same data, only adjusting for total tests performed per 1,000 population.

Then the graph would look…uh…not miraculous at all:





This blundering blogger was not able to include Japan on this chart without it blurring for some reason. But much here is clear. Italy, Germany, and Canada have tested higher percentages of their populations. And there is a critical reason which explains why South Korea has “fallen behind.” South Korea began testing as soon as they learned they had their first case of COVID-19. See that difference on March 18, where the graph above begins. You can see it starts even earlier if you look at the president’s own graph.

South Korea ramped up testing in February, while the U.S. diddled around. And that made all the difference in the world.

____________________

Disinfectant Donald’s “miracle” is no miracle at all. It’s not water into wine—it’s water into vinegar. Or: maybe Clorox bleach. 
____________________


So, by way of Johns Hopkins University, here are the sad statistics just a little before noon, May 7, 2020:

The United States has more cases than any other country on the face of the earth: 1,231,992. That would be 1 case for every 266 Americans. Italy, the country hit second hardest, has one 1 per 282.

Germany has 1 case per 498 persons. And with a population one-fourth of ours, they have only 7,322 deaths.

The U.S. death toll is 73,573—a little more than ten times as bad—and not a “miracle” at all.

Canada has one case for every 581 persons, and they don’t have a border wall to keep themselves safe.

France has 1 case per 375.

South Korea? South Korean leaders didn’t waste weeks talking about how COVID-19 was just the flu—and it would miraculously go away in April. On March 17, four days after Disinfectant Donald finally declared a state of emergency in this country,  South Korea already had 8,320 confirmed cases. The U.S. had only 4,661. But they had been testing relentlessly for weeks, whereas Trump had been claiming we were headed for zero cases soon, and bragging because no one in this country had died. As of today, South Korea has 10,810 cases, or 1 per 4,743 people.

I couldn’t manage to put Japan on my graph—but I didn’t try to fudge my statistics to make the president look bad. I just used basic math. Japan has 15,253 confirmed cases of coronavirus as of today.

Japan also took the threat seriously from the moment the story first broke. Japan has one case for every 8,292 persons. Only 556 Japanese have died as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak.

If you want to find miracles in the math of this pandemic, you’d best not be looking in the Trump administration’s fun house mirrors.
___





May 8-14: The blogger has been working hard on chimney repairs at his home. So far, he has not tumbled headfirst from the ladder. On the other hand, he has fallen behind in chronicling the tragicomic story of Donald J. Trump and his inept Team of Sycophants. But all of the following stories are true, as far as the chimney-fixing blogger can ascertain. As of May 14, the U.S. leads the world, by far, in confirmed cases of COVID-19. The situation has grown so grim, Trump and the nuttiest right-wing nuts have been reduced to claiming the numbers are “rigged” and a “hoax” and a “Deep State” plot. But here are the numbers we have from those “Deep State” medical experts at Johns Hopkins University: 1,405,961 confirmed cases and 85,066 American dead.

Second place on the JHU list falls to Russia—where Vladimir Putin was long a virus-denier like Trump.

(Different countries update their numbers at different times; Worldometers still has Spain in second.)




As recently as Monday, Trump spent an hour talking about how he had the situation under control. That talk in the Rose Garden came complete with his own “Mission Accomplished” banner. Two banners, actually. Where George W. Bush wore a flight jacket, you had to wonder why Trump didn’t don a lab coat and hang a stethoscope around his neck.

Disinfectant Don was there to brag about “the unprecedented testing capacity developed by the United States—the most advanced and robust testing system anywhere in the world, by far.” He wanted everyone who might miss the signs, to left and to right (see above), that the United States was about to “pass 10 million tests conducted—nearly double the number of any other country.”


If you’re a fan of facts, however, it was hard to decide which might be worse. Was Trump simply ill-informed? Or was he lying?

God. It could be both.


The U.S. is leading in number of tests performed.

If Donald spent less time watching television, reacting angrily to what he just saw, and tweeting like a lunatic, he might realize the U.S. is not leading the world in testing, at least not in the way he wants his fans to believe. Countries like Japan and Germany were far more aggressive in regard to testing from the very start. Our president spent the critical early weeks of the crisis claiming that—due to his fantastic leadership—the pandemic was barely going to touch our fabled shores. And it is true. The U.S. is leading the world in number of tests performed. Adjusted for population Spain, Russia, the United Kingdom and Italy have all tested more. Throw in Germany, Belgium, and Belarus for fun, and add even more countries if you like.

There are a number of important caveats if we want to truly understand who really leads the world in testing in the face of a grave coronavirus threat. South Korea, which tested massively from the start, has a total of 10,991 cases and only five deaths per million population. Japan was resolute in testing at a time Trump was still boasting about his giant campaign rallies and blowing off the virus threat. The Japanese have 16,049 confirmed cases and also five deaths per million. Germany tested seriously from the start. No doubt this had something to do with the fact Chancellor Andrea Merkel is a trained scientist and not a virus denier. Death rate: 94 per million.

Ireland and the U.K., two countries Trump claimed were doing a good job handling the crisis—and would therefore not be included in a travel ban he directed against 26 other European nations—turned out not to have been doing a good job after all. The Irish have tested more, adjusted for population. But they started slow and have 305 deaths per million. The United Kingdom has 33,614 dead, more than any other country except the United States. They also started testing late. Their death rate is 495 per million. With Donald J. Trump’s guiding hand at the helm, we also started too slowly. Our death toll stands at 262 per million.


Ms. Jiang had a valid question, not a nasty one.

So it was, on Monday, that CBS White House correspondent Weijia Jiang, wasn’t buying Trump’s “we lead the world” BS. “Why is this a global competition to you if every day Americans are still losing their lives and we’re still seeing more cases every day?” Jiang dared ask.

“They’re losing their lives everywhere in the world and maybe that’s a question you should ask China,” Trump bristled.

Jiang, who describes herself as “a Chinese-born West Virginian,” sensed racism in Disinfectant Don’s response. “Sir,” she asked, voice rising, “why are you saying that to me specifically?”

“I’m saying it to anybody who would ask a nasty question like that,” Trump countered. Ignoring Jiang’s efforts to follow up, he called on CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins. Collins said she would like to yield to Jiang. Trump ignored Collins and called on someone new.

“I just wanted to let my colleague finish, but can I ask you a question?” Collins persisted, trying to keep the microphone.

When Ms. Collins continued to ask a question, Mr. Maturity got mad, stomped off the podium and disappeared into the White House, where he could be warm and toasty and safe from having to explain. 

The reporter who asked the nasty question.

And you could certainly argue, if you liked facts, that Ms. Jiang had a valid question, not a nasty one. On that same day, CDC reported that the U.S. had 18,106 new cases and the next day, and the next, it was worse.

Daily totals for the month:

May 13:          20,869
May 12:          21,467
May 11:          18,106
May 10:          23,792
May 9:            26,660
May 8:            25,996
May 7:            28,974
May 6:            25,253
May 5:            22,303           
May 4:          19,138
May 3:          29,763
May 2:          29,794
May 1:          30,369
______________________________________________

TOTAL:    322,484*

*To keep that number in perspective, the U.S. has racked up more cases in May than any other country has, throughout this crisis.

And let’s not forget: Trump said the virus would go away in April.

*

Meanwhile, hate crimes aimed at Asian-Americans have spiked. Since the start of this crisis, with rising hate fueled in part by Trump’s insistence that we call this the “China virus,” there have been 1,200 crimes directed against Asian-Americans because of their race. Victims include people of Chinese, but also Japanese, Vietnamese and Filipino ancestry.

Because: racists tend to be stupid, even when choosing targets for their racism.

(One is reminded of a spike in hate crimes against Sikhs, after Trump spent the early days of his presidency warning that all Muslims were potential terrorists. Sikhs, of course, aren’t even Muslim.)

As Time notes the crimes have often been heinous. An Asian-American New Yorker had acid thrown in her face. A California high school student was beaten badly and sent to the hospital. An enraged shopper at a Texas Sam’s Club stabbed three other patrons—including two children, ages 2 and 6—because, he shouted, they were “Chinese and infecting people with the coronavirus.” Two of his victims were left in critical condition.

None of this should be a surprise, really. We knew from the day Trump announced he was running for office, that he was going to stir the hatred and fear whenever it suited his purposes. His initial target was Mexican “rapists” and “murderers.” Then he moved on to Muslims. Then it was dark-skinned immigrants from “shithole” countries like Haiti and Nigeria. Neo-Nazis quickly came to believe Trump was speaking a language similar to their own. Many, like Richard Spencer, adopted Donald as the champion of their cause.

Now, as an added haters’ “bonus,” the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has announced that anti-Semitic incidents increased by 12% last year, reaching a new high in 2019. Yearly incidents:

2019:  2,107
2018:  1,879
2017:  1,986 (a 57% increase during Trump’s first year in office)
2016:  1,266
  
WATCH: VIDEO OF NEO-NAZIS FOR TRUMP HERE.


One modern driver of anti-Semitism is QAnon, a conspiracy theory which rose in step with the rise of Donald J. Trump.

According to the ADL: “Fundamentally, the theory claims that almost every president in recent American history up until Donald Trump has been a puppet put in place by a global elite of power brokers hell bent on enriching themselves and maintaining their Satanic child-murdering sex cult.”

Hillary Clinton was purportedly a member of the “Deep State,” which is also referred to as “The Cabal.” That word is derived from the word “cabala,” a mystical Jewish tradition, making the anti-Semitic roots of the conspiracy theory clear. In fact, many of the “leaders” are supposedly prominent Jews, George Soros for one. These liberal elites are also said to  control “the banking system, the Catholic church, the agricultural- and pharmaceutical industries, the media and entertainment industry; all working around the clock to keep the people of the world poor, ignorant and enslaved.” Now, even the global pandemic is said to be the work of this Satanic crew.

Who, then, will break up the ring, bring its leaders to justice, and save us all? Well, “all,” not counting Catholics, Muslims, and Jews, and immigrants with darker pigmentation than most Trump fans.

Who? Donald J. Trump! 

By one count, at least 40 candidates for state or federal office, including several running for Congress, were sympathetic to QAnon. A number of those fools were defeated in the primaries, but they included: 1 Libertarian, 1 Independent, 1 Democrat and 37 members of the GOP.

My favorite might be C. Wesley Morgan, a longshot for a seat in the U.S. Senate, shown here with:



*

While we’re on the topic of stupidity, let’s highlight results of President Trump’s claim that injecting disinfectant might be a good way to combat the coronavirus. The American Association of Poison Control Centers reports a wave of disinfectant-related poisoning calls in recent months.

Time magazine provided the chart:




Nor does stupidity stop there. On Tuesday morning, Trump got mad while watching MSNBC. That led him to suggest in a tweet—without any evidence—that Joe Scarborough, one of the MSNBC morning hosts, might be a murderer. “When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida. Did he get away with murder?” Trump wondered. “Some people think so,” he continued. “Why did he leave Congress so quietly and quickly? Isn’t it obvious? What’s happening now? A total nut job!”

*

A permanent loss of as many as 7,292,800 jobs.

If it isn’t bad enough that Americans are drinking bleach because the president said it might actually work, the nation has massive economic damage that it must now overcome. Today, May 14, we learned that another 2,981,000 Americans filed for unemployment.

In just eight weeks, 36,464,000 men and women have been laid off from work. The good news, if any, is that in one recent poll 80% said they expected to be called back as the economy reopens. The bad news? Twenty percent of 36,464,000 not getting called back would mean a permanent loss of 7,292,800 jobs. Even those whose jobs are safe for now have lost income. They have accepted salary cuts. Hour have been curtailed. Business has been lost.

Officially, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised numbers for March, indicating that 870,000 jobs had been cut. That meant March 2020 was worse than the worst months of losses during the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Then came April and another 20,500,000 jobs were knocked out.

Obviously, we’re off to a rugged start in May, as well.

The president has been busy predicting (the man is terrible when it comes to making predictions) that the U.S. economy will come roaring back—will soar like “a rocket ship” later this year. But that appears increasingly unlikely. Fed chairman Jay Powell warned on Wednesday that there could be “lasting” damage as a result of the outbreak and we could be in for a lengthy recession.

The danger signs are many:

BMW said it expects the auto industry to be held back “for quite some time to come.”

Rail traffic in the U.S. declined 22.1% in the week ending May 9.

Jobs in the clean energy field are down 17% since the start of the pandemic, with 594,300 now idled. And that despite the fact that this year renewables are expected to surpass coal for the first time in percentage of electricity generated in the United States.

Battered by a near-total shutdown of air travel, United Airlines told workers they should consider “voluntary separation” from the company, as United prepares to “right-size” its workforce.

AirBnB has seen its rental business implode. Executive salaries have been halved. The company will also cancel $800 million in advertising for this year. Add that dent to the economy.

A study warns that as many as 100,000 small businesses in this country may have closed for good.

White collar jobs are also being flushed down the toilet—many of them likely for good. Hyatt Hotels announced it was restructuring and would cut 1,300 corporate employees.

States battered by falling tax revenues, may have to lay off 275,000 teachers, adding another dent to a battered U.S. economy. Police and firefighters are likely to feel the axe too.

Another grim warning: half of college graduates may finish schooling just in time to end up unemployed.

Major League baseball is talking about an 82-game schedule, starting in July, without fans in stadiums. Everyone involved will have to take salary cuts to make the system work.

Maersk, which handles one-fifth of all cargo shipped by sea, predicts a global decrease in the second quarter of 20-25%.

Indicative of how deep the damage has been, 1.4 million healthcare workers lost jobs in April, which would seem impossible in a time of a health catastrophe. The American Hospital Association says member institutions have lost $200 billion as elective surgical procedures have been delayed. Primary care physicians are reporting huge losses. Patients are staying home rather than go to the doctor’s office with sore throats, or for annual checkups. Millions who have lost jobs have also lost health insurance. And millions more are staying away, fearful they could end up in doctors’ waiting rooms, seated next to someone who might already be infected with COVID-19.


The federal deficit in April was $737.9 billion.

Even the federal government is in a world of hurt. The deficit in April was $737.9 billion. That was higher than any annual deficit under President Barack Obama in his last five years. That brings the deficit for FY 2021, which began in October, to $1.48 trillion.

That’s already a record for any Fiscal Year.

Still: There is one bright spot! The Trump administration continues to keep the legal profession operating at full throttle. Currently, the president’s minions are appealing a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington D.C. to the U.S. Supreme Court. The lower court has ruled that secret grand jury testimony used in the Mueller investigation should be turned over to CongressIn a 2-to-1 decision, the lower court ruled that grand jury records are court records, not Justice Department records. For that reason, Attorney General Bill Barr can’t just plant his fat fanny on the documents and refuse to move.

According to the Washington Postthe same kind of records “have historically been released to Congress in the course of impeachment investigations involving three federal judges and two presidents.” We should also note that there was at least some belief, back before the coronavirus killed the whole country, that Donald Trump Jr. might have pled the Fifth before the grand jury.

That would be fun to find out.

In two other cases, also on the Supreme Court docket, Trump is fighting to keep his tax returns hidden. Having heard initial arguments in both cases, and listened as the jurists asked questions (all done via video conference), court watchers say they think the president may lose at least one critical case.

Let’s hope he goes 0 for 3.

*

Nor does there seem to be any end to the spread of the virus. Two individuals working in the White House have tested now positive. At least one source told NBC that President Germaphobe was “lava level mad” on hearing the news, furious that staff weren’t doing a better job of protecting his narcissistic self. Now all White House employees are finally required to wear masks. 

Save for two: Trump and VP Pence.

Documents also show that 11 members of the U.S. Secret Service are currently infected, 23 have recovered, and 60 are in self-quarantine.

And did we mention: the U.S. meat supply may be in danger? At the Tyson Foods plant in Waterloo, Iowa, 1,031 employees have fallen ill. But the problem never stops there. One sick person in the White House could infect the president—which would be the ultimate irony. One infected Secret Service agent infects a second and the second infects a third. Each worker at Tyson goes home at the end of his or her shift. An infected worker passes the virus to a family member. Or two. Or everyone in the house. A family member goes to the grocery, infecting a checkout clerk. The checkout worker says, “Hi,” to the mailman, and infects her in turn.

As of April 17 more than 900 U.S. Postal Service workers had tested positive and 30 had died.

In Iowa, where a Republican governor has been proclaiming success in defeating COVID-19, Tyson Foods finally admitted a “few” workers might be infected at yet another plant in Perry. Officials refused to release the exact numbers, until they had no choice. By then, 730 employees had contracted the disease.

Another 221 Tyson employees tested positive for the virus at a plant in Columbus Junction.

It was discovered that 258 workers at a meatpacking facility owned by another company in Tama, Iowa were sick—and 131 at a wind turbine manufacturing plant in Newton.


If you work for Tyson Foods, prayer would be wise.

Meanwhile, Gov. Kim Reynolds had relaxed social distancing rules across the state, saying people could go back to church, starting this month. “Occupancy rates” for sanctuaries, however, would be 25% of normal. Many churches decided rightly that keeping one’s distance from others whose heads were bowed in prayer was still a fine idea. Online services remained the rule. On a positive note, members of the First Assembly of God in Cedar Rapids did at least work together to donate 35,000 pounds of groceries to other hard-hit Iowa families.

Across the river, in Nebraska, another Tyson Foods meatpacking plant in Dakota County also had an explosion in infections, with at least 669 workers recovering or sick. Or in two cases: Dead.

As reported by The New York Times:

The Tyson plant in Dakota City [in Dakota County] has temporarily closed for deep cleaning. Now the workers wait, afraid to go back to work but fearful not to.

“They need money and they want to go back of course,” said Qudsia Hussein, whose husband is an imam helping counsel the families of workers who have been sickened or have died. With many businesses shuttered or suffering financially because of the pandemic, she said, “There’s no other place they can work.”

(Blogger’s note: It is estimated that at least a third of the workers in America’s meatpacking plants are immigrants, including refugees from Ethiopia and Somalia, many of whom are Muslims. Believe it or not, MAGA folks, not all immigrants come here to kill you. Not even Muluka Beker, an Ethiopian woman who trims off the tails of up to 2,500 cattle per day. She has a knife. She is happy to use it. And, rather than cut you up like sausage, she and thousands like her are helping prepare that sausage for your breakfast table.)





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