April 7, 2020: Trump Says No One Knew a Pandemic Was Coming

 

4/7/20: The bad news piled up all day Monday and started piling up again today, even before the blogger awoke. U.S. healthcare experts have known for weeks that the COVID-19 virus can rage almost unchecked in clusters. The first cluster was a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, where 129 residents and staff contracted the virus. Another cluster erupted after a biotech conference in Boston. Cook County Jail, in Chicago, has at least 300 cases. 

U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt.

 

Captain Crozier’s letter would anger the president. 

We know at least 155 members sailors on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt have fallen ill. That includes the former captain, Brent Crozier.

 

Crozier was removed from command last week, in large part because the fat shadow of Donald J. Trump looms over the U.S. Navy. After Crozier wrote a letter, demanding that his crew be allowed to leave the ship and go into quarantine, Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly (who replaced Richard V. Spencer, who described working for Trump as “chaos”) made it clear. He knew Captain Crozier’s letter would anger the president. He knew there would be pressure from the White House if he didn’t act and act quickly.

 

The Acting Secretary spoke with a reporter from the Washington Post about the matter and the “Fake News” folks decided, “Hey, let’s quote him.”

 

Modly explained that his predecessor, Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, “lost his job because the Navy Department got crossways with the president [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted]” in the Gallagher case. “I didn’t want that to happen again.” The acting secretary reiterated the point later in the conversation: “I put myself in the president’s shoes. I considered how the president felt like he needed to get involved in Navy decisions [in the Gallagher case and the Spencer firing]. I didn’t want that to happen again.”

 

Spencer laid out his own response later, in an op-ed in the Post, one of Trump’s least favorite newspapers in all the land. “This was a shocking and unprecedented intervention in a low-level review,” Spencer said of the president’s interference. “It was also a reminder that the president has very little understanding of what it means to be in the military, to fight ethically or to be governed by a uniform set of rules and practices.”

 

Yesterday, we learned that Secretary Modly had made an announcement to the crew of the Theodore Roosevelt.

 

Someone recorded it and leaked it to the press, and the “Enemies of the People” picked up the story again.

 

That is: They held people in authority accountable.

 

In his speech, Modly called the captain “stupid” and “naïve” for sending the letter. He claimed he removed the captain because his letter “created a panic on the ship.” The letter “unnecessarily raised alarms with the families of our sailors and Marines with no plan to address those concerns.”

 

Yes! The letter caused unnecessary alarm! Not the fact that dozens of sailors were coming down sick, with a potentially deadly virus.

 

A storm of criticism – of Modly – began brewing up Monday. At first, he insisted he stood by “every word” of his speech.

 

Even the reported profanity.

 

Then he, and we assume Trump, realized he looked like an ass, and Trump realized he himself looked like an ass, because he backed Modly.

 

On Saturday, the president said he fully supported Sec. Modly’s decision, although he hedged, as he often does, to avoid getting pinned down as the man who bears responsibility. “I didn’t make the decision,” the president pointed out. Or: the buck doesn’t stop here. 

But the “letter was a five-page letter from a captain, and the letter was all over the place. That’s not appropriate.” 

“I thought it was terrible, what he did, to write a letter,” the president added. “I mean, this isn’t a class on literature. This is a captain of a massive ship that’s nuclear powered. And he shouldn’t be talking that way in a letter.”

 

Now, a new day had dawned and Modly had to tack hard as the winds in Washington D.C. blew him off course. He apologized in a statement:

 

I want to apologize to the Navy for my recent comments to the crew of the TR. Let me be clear, I do not think Captain Brett Crozier is naïve nor stupid. I think, and always believed him to be the opposite.

 

I believe, precisely because he is not naive and stupid, that he sent his alarming email with the intention of getting it into the public domain in an effort to draw public attention to the situation on his ship. I apologize for any confusion this choice of words may have caused. I also want to apologize directly to Captain Crozier, his family, and the entire crew of the Theodore Roosevelt for any pain my remarks may have caused.

 

Even Trump seemed to realize it wasn’t a good look to fire a captain who was trying to keep a crew of 5,000, crammed aboard the tight spaces of a warship at sea, safe from an easily transmitted virus. “I’m going to get involved and see exactly what’s going on there,” Trump told reporters at his Monday press conference. “Because I don’t want to destroy somebody for having a bad day.”

 

Which is almost exactly the opposite of what he said on Saturday.

 

*

 

WE ALSO LEARNED that Trump might have to eat a few more words, even though, whenever the president has to eat words, he chews with his mouth open, spits crumbs while he talks, and always blames someone else.

 

It turns out Trump might have to quit making excuses for his administration’s failure, in late January, through February, and into early March, to take the threat of the COVID-19 virus seriously.

 

Remember those happy days, when the president told us the virus would disappear in April; and besides, it was really nothing more serious than the flu?

 

Trump has insisted repeatedly that no one could see this pandemic coming. The free press, this time in the form of The New York Times, another one of the president’s least favorite newspapers, has acquired an email from a top White House economic adviser, Peter Navarro. Dated January 29, it reads in part:

 

The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil. This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.

 

Navarro was hopeful that the virus would be no worse than the flu and economic damage would be slight. But one worst-case scenario he laid out warned that as many as half-a-million Americans could die.

 

But yeah. Who could have seen this coming?

 

Not Donald J. Trump. (See: 6/21/20.)

 

*

 

MEANWHILE, the president insisted yesterday that anyone who needed a test for the coronavirus could get one.

 

The testing the U.S. was doing, with him in charge, was the envy of the world, he said. Every other nation on earth wanted to have tests like us. The best tests. Fantastic tests. Now that you mention it, he would give himself a “10” again for leadership. He was doing a terrific job.

 

That is why, adjusted for population, at least two dozen other countries were testing at higher rates than the U.S.

 

That is why, with all the wonderful testing Trump was doing – it was almost like he was doing it himself, heroically risking his orange self – the U.S. now led the world in confirmed cases of COVID-19.

 

Because our testing was the greatest.

 

As of Tuesday afternoon, Worldometers reports that the U.S. has 380,744 confirmed cases and 11,907 have died.

 

*

 

FORMER FEDERAL RESERVE CHAIRWOMAN Janis Yellen warned Monday that the U.S. economy will almost certainly shrink by 30% in the second quarter.  Unemployment, she added, has likely already reached 12 or 13%, and “moving higher.”

 

*

 

IN OTHER NEWS: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has told her members that a second package of spending increases, necessary to save the groaning U.S. economy, could “easily” cost upwards of $1 trillion.

 

 

*

 

LOCAL AND STATE OFFICIALS in Georgia are also fighting, after Governor Brian Kemp said he was going to reopen the state’s beaches. Kemp, of course, became “famous” recently after admitting that he didn’t realize COVID-19 could be spread by individuals who were asymptomatic.

 

Who knew!

 

Besides every nurse and doctor and health department official, and even every fan of medical dramas on TV.

 

Mayors in several beach towns are unhappy, with one labeling Kemp’s new order “crazy.” The mayor of Tybee Island, for one, warned, “The health of our residents, staff and visitors are being put at risk and we will pursue legal avenues to overturn his reckless mandate.”

 

“We are in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, and while we are closing schools we are reopening beaches,” Savannah Mayor Van Johnson told NBC on Sunday. “In my mind, that does not compute.”

 

(Thirteen states have now closed schools for the rest of the year. Others are likely to follow.)

 

 

 

POSTSCRIPT: When analyzing the motives of President Trump, one should always keep in mind what a narcissistic dick he is.

 

____________________

 

“It is hard not to think that the President’s loss of confidence in me derives from my having faithfully discharged my legal obligations as an independent and impartial Inspector General, and from my commitment to continue to do so.”

 

Inspector General Michael Atkinson

____________________

 

 

While most of us have been busy trying to keep at least six feet away from other human beings, another Inspector General made the news. This time, the IG in question was Michael Atkinson, a Trump choice for the job, and a man in charge of keeping the intelligence community of the United States from breaking the rules. Atkinson had the misfortune, as it were, to have done his job to the best of his abilities.

 

When a whistleblower complaint landed on his desk, involving President Trump’s questionable call to the leader of Ukraine, Atkinson determined that the complaint was valid.

 

As per the law, he sent it on to Congress.

 

Fired on Friday, he said in a statement, “It is hard not to think that the President’s loss of confidence in me derives from my having faithfully discharged my legal obligations as an independent and impartial Inspector General, and from my commitment to continue to do so.”

 

Trump defended the firing this past Saturday when a reporter asked. Atkinson, he said, was a “disgrace.”

 

And, by the way, you know who really hates whistleblowers and likes to silence them in any way they can? Chinese communist rulers.

 

Yeah. Those guys.

 

It is now believed that China might have been able to limit the worldwide spread of COVID by 95%, if authorities hadn’t been so anxious to muzzle everyone who tried to blow a whistle.

 

Last year, China sent 48 reporters to jail.

 

 

NOT-SO-MUCH-FUN FACT: Pastor Landon Spradlin, of Gretna, Virginia dies from COVID-19. Even as he battled the virus, he posted on social media about the “mass hysteria” surrounding the disease. He said the media was pumping up the danger in order to make President Trump look bad.

 

“It will come and it will go,” he predicted.

 

Now he’s gone.

 

The story I read makes Pastor Spradlin sound like a good man, with loving children who  will miss him. A sad and unnecessary waste.

April 11, 2020: The Man with the Narcissistic Personality Disorder Stays the Course

 

4/11/20: The facts are brutal. Thursday, we learned that another 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment.

 

That brings the three-week total to 16.8 million.

 

The number will rise once unemployment offices, swamped by applications, catch up with paperwork.

 

Closing down the country to stop a killer virus has wiped out all the jobs added to the U.S. economy since 2013.

 

____________________

 

If it’s not clear to you that Trump is afflicted with the Narcissistic Personality Disorder you need to look up the symptoms yourself.

____________________

 

 

Still, if you had any doubts about what kind of person the president is, you should have learned a cold, hard truth this week. The man who previously loved to boast about creating “jobs, jobs, jobs,” will be lucky (and we, as a nation, will be lucky) if he doesn’t go down in history known as “Depression Don.” Yet, in the bitter end, the only job Donald J. Trump cares about is his own.

 

That’s why you could find him tweeting angrily Thursday, the same day the nation learned that all those millions of men and women were out of work, about the great ratings he was piling up with his daily press conferences. After the Wall Street Journal criticized him for appearing on TV too often, rambling on too long, doubling back and repeating himself, getting facts wrong, and contradicting health experts, Trump fired off this narcissistic gem:

 

 

Only Trump.

 

Only such a man would be talking about “Monday Night Football” and “Bachelor Finale” numbers at a time like this, when the only numbers that should matter are 16.8 million men and women suddenly out of work.

 

Only someone like Trump could be bragging about “ratings” at such a moment in history.

In large part due to Trump’s failure to take the threat of a pandemic seriously, the U.S. “rates” #1 in total confirmed cases of COVID-19 (532,879), and #1 in deaths (20,577), as of Saturday evening.

 

But this is who Trump is. If it’s not clear to you that the man is afflicted with the Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) you need to look up the symptoms yourself. Why be surprised that he’s capable of talking about great ratings at a time of national despair? He cheated on his first wife. He didn’t learn a lesson, even when his children were hurt. He cheated on his second wife. He still didn’t learn a lesson, save for the lesson a person with NPD might be expected to learn. That he was rich and if he hurt others his wealth would protect him from pain.

 

He moved on and remarried. Then he cheated on his third wife, too, and not just once.

This is who Donald J. Trump really is.

 

One of the symptoms of a Narcissistic Personality Disorder is “a lack of empathy,” and when you ignore the pain of 16.8 million newly unemployed, and the loss of more than 20,000 lives, that’s lack of empathy writ large.

 

 

LACK OF EMPATHY

 

 

Nor could Trump let the Wall Street Journal criticism go. He couldn’t because he is who he is and that’s a warped man.

 

So, he repeated his tone-deaf boast Friday, in another disgusting tweet:

 

Because the T.V. Ratings for the White House News Conference’s are the highest, the Opposition Party (Lamestream Media), the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats &, of course, the few remaining RINO’S, are doing everything in their power to disparage & end them. The People’s Voice!

 

*

 

TO FOCUS our point, let’s consider a handful of jobs lost and gained this past week. One who found himself out of work was Captain Brett Crozier, commander of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt. Crozier had made the mistake of making Trump look bad.

 

With the coronavirus spreading, he fired off a letter to top leaders of the U.S. Navy (and by implication to the president himself) demanding action to protect the 5,000 men and women aboard. By the time the letter leaked to the press, dozens had taken sick. Given the cramped living conditions on the warship, Crozier warned the situation could only get worse. 

There were press reports immediately, that Trump wanted the captain fired. He let Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly do the dirty deed and then backed Modly up when he canned Crozier. 

“I thought it was terrible, what he did, to write a letter,” the president said of the captain just last week. 

“I mean, this isn’t a class on literature. This is a captain of a massive ship that’s nuclear powered. And he shouldn’t be talking that way in a letter.” Trump said he agreed with the decision to fire him, “100 percent.”

 

Modly claimed he fired Crozier because he broke chain of command. Then Modly visited Guam, where the Theodore Roosevelt was anchored, and tried to explain his decision in a talk over the ship intercom. All he really did was anger most of the men and women who heard him speak.

 

Meanwhile, Crozier’s warning proved true. First, he fell ill with COVID-19. Then the virus spread, even as the Navy began evacuating the ship. By Thursday, there were 416 confirmed cases among the officers, sailors and Marines.

 

 

“His motives were pure. He was looking out for his crew.” 

By Friday, the commander of the 7th Fleet, Vice Admiral Bill Merz, was talking to CNN  and admitting that the crew was in a bad place. “There was lots of anxiety about the virus,” Merz told Barbara Starr, the respected Pentagon reporter. “As you can imagine the morale covers the spectrum, considering what they have been through.” Starr noted that Merz repeatedly described the crew as “capable and performing well,” which could be read as validation of Crozier’s leadership before he was axed. The men and women of the Theodore Roosevelt were justifiably concerned.

 

The carrier crew was “struggling in the wake of losing their CO [commanding officer] and their perception of the lack of activity regarding fighting the virus,” Merz said.

 

Merz suggested that the crew did not appear to have been given a comprehensive and clear sense of the various steps the Navy was taking to help the Roosevelt deal with the virus outbreak onboard. That lack of information may have caused some stress, he suggested, feeding the very visible anger many crew members displayed when [Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas] Modly visited the ship and addressed them about Crozier’s dismissal.

 

“I think we could have told them earlier what we knew” about the virus Merz said. “The degree of accuracy against the virus at any level is a little sketchy, but I think we could have at least bought them in earlier and started having this dialog up front.”

 

“The specific questions [Merz fielded] clearly indicated we needed to give them more information about the true dangers of the virus” and how the Navy was handling [sic] aboard the ship, he said.

 

Of Captain Crozier, Merz added, “I certainly don’t question his motives. I think his motives were pure. He was looking out for his crew.”

 

Starr also reported that a sailor who had tested positive had been found unconscious by “his buddies.” He had been rushed to an intensive care unit on Guam. 

Suddenly, the Narcissist-in-Chief woke up to the threat. He wasn’t worried about Captain Crozier. He wasn’t worried about the sailor in intensive care or the hundreds who had been infected. He was worried about himself, as any narcissist must be. If the firing made him look bad, if sailors died for no good reason, and that angered active duty military and their families – he might not keep his job come November.

 

That meant he had to act. Trump sent out Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to tell reporters that he, the president, was “open” to reinstating Crozier to command. “We’ve taken nothing off the table,” Esper told CBS News. “My inclination is always to support the chain of command, and to take the recommendations seriously.”

 

So: Crozier was out because he made Trump look bad.

 

Then Crozier might be in again, because bringing him back might make Trump look good.

 

And now Modly was out – having resigned – because he had to take the fall to ease the criticism aimed at his boss.

 

So, add another American to the unemployment line.

 

*

 

AS THIS BLOGGER readily admits, he does not care for this president at all. But this blogger is a fan of the facts. So here are a few facts about one lucky individual who landed a plum job last week.

 

In case you missed it, the White House has a new press secretary, the fourth to hold that post under Mr. Trump. Her name is Kayleigh McEnany. (Fact.) She’s blonde. (Fact.) McEnany must be smart. (Supposition.) She has a law degree from Harvard. (Fact.) She has insisted that Trump “doesn’t lie.” (Fact – that she said that. Absurd that she did.) McEnany said in February that the coronavirus wasn’t coming to America, and said as late as March 11, that it posed no threat. (Fact and fact – that she said that – not that she was correct.)

 

Just for fun, imagine you had the choice of hiring anyone in this country to fill this post. The job of the White House Press Secretary is (in theory) to stand before reporters and the American people and tell the truth, or the best version of the truth you can present. Would you, if you were making this hire, dig deep in a pile of manure and pluck out a woman who made her name as a “birther,” denying that Barack Obama had a right to serve as our nation’s top executive?

 

You would if you were Donald J. Trump. Because you would suffer from a Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

 

Citizen Trump made the same false claim for years, until finally, he realized late in the 2016 campaign that his racist-tinged lies were hurting him in the eyes of moderate, undecided voters. Then, and only then, did he do what a narcissist does. He did what was best for himself.

 

He admitted Obama was born in America, after all.

 

He did it in the least words possible and never apologized or admitted he had been wrong. He didn’t recant because he cared about truth. He recanted in service to the only “greater good” a narcissist ever sees.

 

He did it for himself.

 

McEnany, then, is the perfect person to shield the Narcissist-in-Chief from any harsh truths.

 

  

The blogger was curious. Who exactly was this new White House Press Secretary, and what made her tick? 

It turned out to be fun to revisit some of her comments from 2015 and 2016, before she sold her soul for a chance to get paid to sneer at reporters. Commenting on then-Candidate Trump, she was spot on when condemning his comments, after coming down the escalator to announce he was running for president. After he called almost all Mexicans “rapists” and “killers,” she was clear. “To me,” she said, “a racist statement is a racist statement. I don’t like what Donald Trump said.” 

She said it was “inauthentic” to call him a Republican. In fact, she laid the “RINO” tag on her future boss, describing him as a “Republican in name only.” 

“Donald Trump has shown himself to be a showman,” she said during the campaign. “I don’t think he’s a serious candidate. I think it’s a sideshow. It’s not within the mainstream of the candidates.” 

Asked recently how she squared her comments then with her work as White House Press Liar now, she said she had been led astray after “listening to CNN.” 

Anyway, that’s our humor for today.