Dont Blame Trump, he inherited this mess

shootersa · Apr 30, 2020

More anonymous and unnamed sources supporting a premise not supported by facts to attack the Trump administration.

stumbler · Apr 30, 2020

For the first time I agree with @shootersa. WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!

Trump says he’s personally running government’s vaccine program in self-pitying rant: ‘You know who’s in charge of it? I am’

President Donald Trump claimed to be personally overseeing the U.S. vaccine program during an Oval Office press briefing.

The president and his economic advisers spoke to reporters Thursday, and the president said he was in charge of “Operation Warp Speed,” a White House initiative that reportedly promised to deliver 300 million doses of a vaccine that could be ready by January.

*“I’m not overpromising, I don’t know who said it, but whatever the maximum is, whatever you can humanly do, we’re going to have,” Trump said, “and we hope you’re going to come up with a good vaccine. Johnson & Johnson, Oxford, lots of different great companies, representatives of our country in some ways. [National Institutes of Health] is working very hard and doing a terrific job. No, I hope you’re going to have a vaccine, and we are going to fast-track it like you’ve never been seen before, if we come up with the vaccine. I think they probably will.”

“You know is in charge of it, honestly, I am,” he added. “I’ll tell you, I’m really in charge of it. I could say somebody else, I will say we are dealing with, as you know, the general and the admiral. We are very much in charge. I think probably more than anything, I am in charge. I’m the one that gets blamed, I get blamed anyway. Don’t forget, if we come up with a vaccine in record time, they’ll say I should have done it faster. We have a lot of good possibilities.”
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*Once again Trump is just babbling incoherent nonsense.

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/tr...ying-rant-you-know-whos-in-charge-of-it-i-am/

stumbler · May 1, 2020

‘Very proud’ Trump says US coronavirus deaths per capita are ‘very strong’ – and that’s very bad

President Donald Trump stood in the East Room of the White House Thursday afternoon and declared he is “very proud” of his performance on the number of coronavirus deaths per capita. Trump announced that deaths per million are “very, very strong,” but he has no idea how right he is, because coronavirus deaths per capita in the U.S. are very, very high, and that’s very, very bad.

“I don’t think anybody’s done a better job, with testing, with ventilators, with all of the things that we’ve done, and our death totals, our numbers per million people, are really very very strong,” Trump bragged to the room who had come to hear him speak about caring for seniors during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re very proud of the job we’ve done,” the President proclaimed.

Currently the U.S. coronavirus death toll stands at 63,827, the highest number of any country in the world. In deaths per million, which Trump bragged are “very very strong,” the U.S. ranks number 16 out of 214 countries. Number one is the worst. So there are currently 198 countries that are doing a better job in the deaths per capita, or deaths per million, measurement.

On testing, which Trump also declared no one else has done a better job, which is a bald-faced lie, the U.S. ranks number 43 out of 214. Number one is the best.

President Trump is either outright lying or has no understanding of this basic mathematical measurement. But this isn’t just math, it’s literally life and death.

Watch:

Kyle Griffin ✔ @kylegriffin1

Trump today: "Our death totals, our numbers, per million people, are really very, very strong. We're very proud of the job we've done." Via CSPAN

1,578
4:10 PM - Apr 30, 2020

Note: Numbers and ranks current as of time of publication, subject to change. All data via Worldometers.
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https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/ve...er-capita-are-very-strong-and-thats-very-bad/

stumbler · May 1, 2020

While Trump Talks Re-Opening Plans, Feds Quietly Order 100,000 More Body Bags

The federal government placed orders for well over 100,000 new body bags and invited bids to provide 200 rented refrigerated trailers to hold victims of COVID-19 in April, NBC News reports. The largest individual body-bag order was reportedly made by the Federal Emergency Management Agency on the day after President Donald Trump projected that the total U.S. death toll from the virus might not exceed 50,000 or 60,000 people. The “human remains pouches” have not been paid for or shipped yet, the company’s marketing manager told NBC. The documents reportedly show the coronavirus task-force members remain deeply concerned about several major risks ahead, including insufficient availability of coronavirus tests, the absence of a vaccine or proven treatments, and the possibility of a “catastrophic resurgence” of COVID-19.

Read it at NBC News
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https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump...-quietly-order-100000-more-body-bags?ref=home

stumbler · May 2, 2020

I am not responsible for anything. We have the virus under control and our response has been great. Can we have a second opinion on that? Not just no. Fuck no,

White House Won’t Let Fauci Testify to House Panel on Coronavirus Response

The White House has blocked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the public face of the country’s coronavirus response, from testifying before a Congressional committee, according to a Democratic aide who spoke with The Daily Beast. As reported in the Washington Post, the House Appropriations Committee requested the doctor’s testimony at a hearing next week related to its investigation of the federal government’s coronavirus response. The White House denied approval and claimed that Fauci’s appearance during a pandemic would be “counterproductive.” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has attracted attention for his addresses to the public as the lead scientist on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, which sometimes has put him at odds with President Trump’s pseudoscientific ramblings.

Read it at The Washington Post
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https://www.thedailybeast.com/white...-house-panel-on-coronavirus-response?ref=home

Sanity_is_Relative · May 3, 2020

ace's n 8's · May 3, 2020

stumbler said: ↑

I am not responsible for anything. We have the virus under control and our response has been great. Can we have a second opinion on that? Not just no. Fuck no,

White House Won’t Let Fauci Testify to House Panel on Coronavirus Response

https://www.thedailybeast.com/white...-house-panel-on-coronavirus-response?ref=home
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Oh my...the left has opened an investigation to Trump and his Administration on the response of CoVid 19?...is that what I see here?

Gee whiz...if that dont spell out total desperation on the left.

shootersa · May 3, 2020

Same old, same old.
Get Trump, no matter what.

stumbler · May 3, 2020

Inside Donald Trump and Jared Kushner’s Two Months of Magical Thinking
Obsessed with impeachment and their enemies and worried about the stock market, the president and his son-in-law scapegoated HHS Secretary Alex Azar, and treated the coronavirus as mostly a political problem as it moved through the country.

By Gabriel Sherman

April 28, 2020

On the afternoon of Thursday, March 19, Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office obsessing over the beaches in Florida. CNN footage of shirtless spring breakers packed onto the sand while the coronavirus pandemic raged sparked national outrage—and pressure on Trump to act. The next morning, New York governor Andrew Cuomo would announce strict stay-at-home orders for residents, but Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis refused to close his state’s beaches, a position even Florida’s Republican senator Rick Scott called reckless. “Lots of people were telling Trump to lean on Ron,” a Trump adviser said.

Trump’s view of the situation was complicated, though. For weeks, his top medical advisers, Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, had been hectoring him about the seriousness of the crisis and the necessity of swift action, testing, lockdowns. “We knew from the beginning...we were going to get cases in the United States,” Fauci told me.

“We knew we were in for a very serious problem.”

Sometimes, Trump listened. The disease was coming closer to his own circle—chief of staff Mark Meadows and communications director Stephanie Grisham were self-quarantining—and the number of cases in New York City had reached 4,000. But the substrate of his thinking hadn’t evolved, and it kept reappearing. He worried about the economy, which was crucial to his reelection. He vented to friends that the doctors were alarmist, and that the crisis was something Democrats and the media were doing to him. “Trump was obsessed with Pelosi, Schiff, the media, just obsessed. He would say, ‘They’re using it against me!’ recalled a Republican in frequent contact with the White House. “It was unhinged.”

Florida was a test case of his magical thinking about the novel coronavirus: That it was temporary, that warm weather would make it disappear. But eight Florida residents had already died from COVID-19 and more than 400 had been diagnosed. “Given the elderly population, if that took off, it would be a nightmare,” a person close to Trump told me. At an adviser’s urging, Trump called DeSantis to tell him to shut down the beaches.

“Ron, what are you doing down there?” Trump said, according to a person briefed on the call.

“I can’t ban people from going on the beach,” DeSantis snapped, surprising Trump.

“These pictures look really bad to the rest of the country,” Trump said.

“Listen, we’re doing it the right way,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis’s intransigence backed Trump into a corner. The 41-year-old governor was a Trump protégé and a crucial ally in a must-win state. “Trump is worried about Florida, electorally,” said a Republican who spoke with Trump around this time. Trump did something he rarely does: He caved. He told DeSantis the beaches could stay open.

“I understand what you’re saying,” Trump said, and hung up.

It was inevitable that Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar would become the West Wing COVID-19 scapegoat. An avuncular Yale educated lawyer with owlish glasses and a beard, Azar was not, as Trump liked to say, out of central casting. Equally bad, Azar was a “Bushie,” as Trump called Republicans who served in George W. Bush’s administration. Azar was briefed on a new and dangerous coronavirus sweeping the Chinese city of Wuhan by CDC director Robert Redfield on January 3—but he struggled to communicate this knowledge to the president. At the time of the outbreak, Trump had soured on Azar, whom he blamed for his weak health care polling numbers. “Trump thought Azar was a disaster. He is definitely on the gangplank,” a person close to Trump told me. Azar wasn’t able to speak to Trump about the virus for two weeks, even though Trump called him during this period to scream that the White House’s ban on e-cigarettes, a response to a health crisis that he believed could help him politically, had become a drag on his poll numbers. “I never should have done this fucking vaping thing!” Trump told Azar on January 17, a person familiar with the call told me.

When Azar finally told Trump about the outbreak on the phone at Mar-a-Lago, on the night of Saturday, January 18, Trump cut him off and launched into another e-cigarette rant. “Trump jumped his shit about vaping,” a person briefed on the phone call told me.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, shared Trump’s view that the media and Democrats were hyping the crisis for political purposes. And for both of them, the biggest worry was how the response to the coronavirus might impact the health of the economy. According to sources, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, a fierce China hawk, and deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, a former China-based Wall Street Journal reporter who’d covered the 2003 SARS pandemic, argued to officials in mid-January that the White House needed to shut down incoming flights from China.

Kushner pushed back. “Jared kept saying the stock market would go down, and Trump wouldn’t get reelected,” a Republican briefed on the internal debates said (a person close to Kushner denies this). Kushner’s position was supported by Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council chief Larry Kudlow. Trump sided with them. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump minimized the threat in his first public comments. “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control,” he told CNBC. (The White House and Treasury Department deny Mnuchin and Kudlow were against closing flights.)

When the coronavirus exploded out of China, Kushner was the second most powerful person in the West Wing, exerting influence over virtually every significant decision, from negotiating trade deals to 2020 campaign strategy to overseeing Trump’s impeachment defense. “Jared is running everything. He’s the de facto president of the United States,” a former White House official told me. The previous chief of staff John Kelly, who’d marginalized Kushner, was long gone, and Mick Mulvaney, a virtual lame duck by that point, let Kushner run free. “Jared treats Mick like the help,” a prominent Republican said.

“Jared kept saying the stock market would go down and Trump wouldn’t get reelected.”

Kushner’s princely arrogance had been a fixture in the West Wing since Trump’s inauguration. “The family has a degree of trust and protection that no one else enjoys,” the former West Wing official said. Kushner can appear mild-mannered, but, like his father-in-law, he seemed to relish the power he derived from crushing adversaries. After Trump’s acquittal, Kushner helped orchestrate a purge of national security officials that testified against the president. According to a source, Kushner provided the White House’s 29-year-old personnel director, John McEntee, with a list of names to be fired. ("In no way shape or form did Jared provide a list to Johnny McEntee on people to be fired," a source familiar with the matter said).

During his time in the West Wing, Kushner had become hardened to a degree that was sometimes shocking. The days of selling the notion that he and Ivanka were moderating forces were long gone—combat was everything. A New York business executive recalled a meeting with Kushner at the White House last fall. “I told Jared that if Trump won a second term, he wouldn’t have to worry about running again and you can really help people. Jared just looked at me and said, ‘I don’t care about any of that.’” The executive came away shaken. “I wanted to tell Jared you don’t say that part out loud, even in private,” he later said. (A source close to Kushner says he has no recollection of making the comment.)

Kushner had an enemies list as long as Trump’s, and at times it played into his response to the crisis. He scoffed when his old nemesis, Steve Bannon, launched a podcast called War Room: Pandemic in January. “Steve’s a dead man. Last he was seen, he was standing on the side of the FDR Drive with the squeegee guys,” Kushner told a Republican around this time.

Kushner also had a famously unshakable belief in his own judgment. According to sources, Trump’s former Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert told Kushner in early March that the White House needed to step up its coronavirus response. “Tom tried sounding the alarm with Jared,” said a person who spoke to Bossert at the time. (Bossert denies this.) Kushner, according to the person, dismissed Bossert’s concerns. Bossert later published his advice in a Washington Post op-ed. “Tom was hammering him: ‘You have to get on this.’ No one listened, so he wrote the op-ed,” a former West Wing official said. Bossert later told people that Kushner icily told him the op-ed was a mistake. (Bossert denies this.)

Navarro and Pottinger finally convinced Trump to stop the flights when they showed him that more than 400,000 people had entered the U.S. from China since early January. “Trump was stunned by the sheer scale,” a Republican briefed on the meeting told me. “Navarro banged on the table enough to get the flights stopped.” On January 31, Trump barred travel from China. Even then, it was a half measure: the ban only applied to non-Americans who had traveled to China in the previous 14 days. American citizens could come and go.

Trump saw this as the end of the story—he’d taken strong public action, built his China Wall. Now, he looked forward to hitting the campaign trail and trumpeting the booming stock market. “He just wanted to hold rallies and watch television,” a former West Wing official said. “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” Trump told Sean Hannity during a pre–Super Bowl interview on February 2. He held a half dozen rallies over the next month.

But it was just the beginning.

On February 5, the Republican-controlled Senate acquitted Trump without hearing from a single witness. He was gleeful, and immediately turned his attention to his enemies. “Trump’s playbook is simple,” said a former White House official. “Go after people who crossed him during impeachment.” Forty-eight hours after the verdict, Trump launched his purge of career officials who testified in the House, including Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a decorated Iraq War veteran and, for good measure, his twin brother, who also worked in the government.

Focused on his purge and his reelection, Trump mostly told himself a happy story about the virus, cherry-picking the most optimistic projections. He assured friends at Mar-a-Lago that Chinese president Xi Jinping promised him the outbreak would die out in warmer weather. “He said Xi told him it would all be over in April,” a Republican who spoke with Trump told me. At a rally in New Hampshire on February 10, Trump declared: “We only have 11 cases and they are all getting better.”

They weren’t. On February 23, the CDC documented the first case of person-to-person transmission in California. “Once you had community spread, we realized all bets are off,” Fauci later told me. Trump tweeted on February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA….Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” The market plunged nearly 900 points the next day. Trump called Azar and screamed that the CDC was alarming people. “It’s a little bit like the flu,” Trump assured reporters at the White House.

The same day, Trump finally pushed Azar aside and put vice president Mike Pence in charge of the White House’s coronavirus task force. According to a source, Trump had considered other candidates—former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Birx, and former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb—but he told people that bringing in a credentialed outsider would signal a larger concern about the virus. “It’s going to make the issue bigger than it needs to be,” he said to an adviser. He also knew that Pence could be controlled. “Trump trusts Pence almost more than anyone,” a former White House official said. In the West Wing, Trump often belittles Pence in front of others. “Pence lives in mortal fear of being booted off the ticket. Trump constantly reminds Mike that he almost didn’t choose him,” a Republican that heard Trump make the comments told me.

Trump viewed the media as the force most toxic to his administration, and he sometimes took this belief to paranoid lengths. In early March, Trump told aides that journalists hated him so much they would try to contract coronavirus on purpose to give it to him on Air Force One, a person close to the administration told me. “This is full-blown, pathological, paranoid-level delusion,” a former West Wing official said. Trump claimed CNN and MSNBC were trying to drive down the stock market. “I want to get Comcast!” he told a prominent Republican. “He wants Justice to open investigations of the media for market manipulation,” the person close to the administration told me.

Trump’s role as crisis pitchman became paramount, and any glitches sent him over the edge. A source said Trump was furious about his appearance during a Fox News town hall on March 5. “Trump said afterwards that the lighting was bad and he had a brown spot on his face,” a source briefed on the conversation said. “He said, ‘I look terrible! We need Bill Shine back in here. Bill would never allow this.’”

His press conference at the CDC on March 6 was his first full-scale attempt at media ownership of the crisis, and it will be remembered as a Trumpian classic, heavy on braggadocio, an infomercial with himself as the product. “I like this stuff. I really get it,” Trump told reporters, his face partly hidden under a red “Keep America Great” hat. “People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors say, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should’ve done that instead of running for president.”

When reviews, understandably, were not good, he complained that White House officials weren’t defending him. “He was very frustrated he doesn’t have a good team around him,” a former White House official said. Trump vented to aides about Mnuchin, whom he blamed for encouraging him to pick Jerome Powell, a frequent Trump target, as chairman of the Federal Reserve. “Steve picked Powell and Powell is trying to screw me!” Trump said, according to a Republican who overheard the comments. Sources said Trump fumed over Larry Kudlow’s refusal to hold an on-camera press briefing to talk up the markets. “Larry didn’t want to have to take questions about coronavirus,” a person close to Kudlow told me. “Larry’s not a doctor. How can he answer questions about something he doesn’t know?”

Fox News, as always, was Trump’s safe place. The network’s hosts had been following his cues, aggressively amplifying claims that COVID-19 posed little danger. “It’s actually the safest time to fly,” Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt told viewers in early March, a clip that came to symbolize the network’s cavalier approach to the pandemic. Some inside Fox feared this denialism could get viewers killed and expose the network to massive legal liability. “If you want to get on the air, you had to say crazy shit about the virus,” one Fox staffer told me. Tucker Carlson was an important exception. Partly for ideological reasons—China bashing is a running story line on his show—Carlson covered the epidemic early. “Every day now brings thousands of new cases and dozens of new deaths in China.... We should be vigilant as well. We have infections already in this country,” he warned viewers on February 4.

Carlson privately told friends that Trump failed to grasp the scale of the crisis. Normally, when Carlson has advice for the White House, he says it on television. But after Trump’s rambling CDC press conference on March 6, Carlson realized the situation was an emergency and he needed to confront Trump in person.

The following afternoon, Carlson drove from his Florida home to Mar-a-Lago—surprisingly his first visit—and was astonished by what he found. The club that weekend was an alternate reality where coronavirus didn’t seem to exist. Down by the pool, Kimberly Guilfoyle was hosting a cocktail party for a hundred friends to kick off her lavish 51st birthday celebration. The guest list included much of Trumpworld’s elite, including Guilfoyle’s boyfriend Don Jr., Eric and Lara Trump, Lindsey Graham, Rudy Giuliani and Pence—even Tiffany Trump flew in for the weekend. Later that night, Guilfoyle break-danced. The president sang happy birthday after he dined on the patio shoulder-to-shoulder with Ivanka and Kushner and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s delegation.

Carlson met with Trump before Guilfoyle’s party got going. He didn’t expect to get much face time. The conversation lasted two hours. Carlson told Trump that COVID-19 posed an existential threat to the country—and his reelection—unless the White House took aggressive steps to slow the spread. “I said exactly what I’ve said on TV, which is this could be really bad,” Carlson later told Vanity Fair’s Joe Hagan. “My view [was] that we may have missed the point where we can control it.” Carlson’s message seemed to puncture Trump’s bubble. “[Trump] is just now waking up to the fact that this is bad, and he doesn’t know how to respond,” a Republican told me around this time.

What Trump didn’t know then was that coronavirus was spreading unchecked around Mar-a-Lago. Bolsonaro’s press secretary later tested positive and potentially seeded a cluster. He’d shaken hands with Trump and Pence and attended Guilfoyle’s party (more than a dozen members of the Brazilian delegation eventually came down with COVID-19). Guilfoyle’s friend, Republican fundraiser Caroline Wren, developed suspicious symptoms, a source told me. “Kimberly spent all week with Caroline,” the source said. (A spokesperson for the Trump campaign said Wren tested negative.) RNC chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel also came down with symptoms after attending a donor retreat at Mar-a-Lago.

The same weekend, news broke that an attendee of CPAC, the conservative activist conference, tested positive for coronavirus, and that Trump had potentially been exposed. Fauci and other officials wanted Trump to announce social-distancing guidelines and other mitigation strategies. But Trump was still pushing back. He refused to get tested and insisted that he would continue to hold rallies. “He is going to resist until the very last minute,” a former West Wing official told me in early March. “He may take suggestions to stop shaking hands, but in terms of shutting stuff down, his position is: ‘No, I’m not going to do it.’”

On March 11, the World Health Organization declared coronavirus a global pandemic, and Trump agreed to broadcast an Oval Office address to the nation. But even then, Kushner advised Trump to tread lightly. One source briefed on the internal conversations said Kushner told Trump not to declare a national emergency during the address because “it would tank the markets.” The markets cratered anyway, and Trump announced the national emergency later in the week. “They had to clean that up on Friday,” the source said. (A person close to Kushner denies this version of events.)

Even as the crisis was tearing through New York, with emerging problems in Louisiana, Michigan, and Illinois, Trump obsessed over the future, fixating on the fall and his reelection. He took time to call NFL owners and urge them not to preemptively cancel football season. “Trump begged them not to cancel,” said a source briefed on the call.

“This is going to be 9/11 and Pearl Harbor combined. People are going to be covering their asses for years.”

Increasingly, Kushner was in control of Trump’s response. Looking to keep him close, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short recruited Kushner to officially join the coronavirus task force on March 12. “Pence people look at Jared apprehensively. Pence treats Jared as a peer,” said Sam Nunberg, the former Trump aide. Kushner quickly assembled a shadow network of coronavirus advisers that became more powerful than Pence’s official team. He even worked on Shabbat, a source who spoke with him on a Saturday said. (A person close to Kushner says working on Shabbat is accepted for Orthodox Jews if it’s “to save someone’s life.”) “On balance, Pence wanted Jared involved because it guarantees Trump is focused,” an executive who Kushner consulted recalled.

Azar was still the necessary scapegoat. Kushner blamed him for the criticism Trump received about the delays in testing, according to a person in frequent touch with the West Wing. “This was a total mess,” Kushner told people when he got involved. Kushner had no medical experience, but that didn’t seem to matter. “To be honest, when I got involved, I was a little intimidated. But I know how to make this government run now,” Kushner said, according to a source. “The arrogance was on full display.”

Kushner advocated for the iconoclastic public-private approach he had used for his Mideast peace plan. He reached out to business leaders like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, according to a source. With bravado only partly grounded in reality, he promised Trump that Google was rolling out a testing website. He also made a point of bypassing normal channels, phoning Wall Street executives and asking for advice on how to help New York, people briefed on the conversation said. A former West Wing official said Kushner’s involvement wrought chaos: business leaders wanting to contribute masks or ventilators didn’t know who in government to call. According to two sources, Kushner told Trump about experimental treatments he’d learned of from executives in Silicon Valley. “Jared is bringing conspiracy theories to Trump about potential treatments,” a Republican briefed on the conversations told me. (A person close to Kushner said he brought COVID testing ideas to Trump.) Trump could be a receptive audience. Another former West Wing official told me: “Trump is like an 11-year-old boy waiting for the fairy godmother to bring him a magic pill.”

Kushner encouraged Trump to push back against Cuomo after the New York governor gave an emotional press conference during which he said New York was short 30,000 ventilators. In a White House meeting, Kushner told people that Cuomo was being an alarmist. “I have all this data about ICU capacity. I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators,” Kushner said, according to a person present. Trump later echoed him, telling Sean Hannity in an interview, “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.”

By early April, Trump began to realize that he was losing the messaging war. Cuomo’s morning press briefings, which had become appointment television for many, were a particular goad. “He’s said Cuomo looks good,” said a Republican briefed on internal conversations. Trump counterprogrammed with his own evening press conferences. As a former West Wing official put it, “Trump wants to play press secretary.” He prepared each day with Hope Hicks, who returned to the White House after a brief stint working for Fox Corp, nominally working for Jared Kushner. A source said she counseled him on how to look presidential. But the briefings could stretch to Soviet lengths, often over two hours, and they lurched wildly in tone. With the media as a captive audience, Trump often couldn’t resist shifting into rally mode. One day, he lit into NBC News reporter Peter Alexander when Alexander asked what Trump would say to Americans who are scared about the crisis. The confrontation energized Trump, according to a Republican who spoke to him afterward. “He was in the Oval Office feeling positive,” the source said.

Fauci had become a costar and a straight-man foil, something that Trump has never been able to stand. Their relationship was badly strained after Fauci gave a series of candid interviews and appeared to face palm as Trump spoke at a press conference. “I made Fauci a star. The least he could do is give me a little credit,” Trump complained to a friend. Republicans became so worried that Trump would fire Fauci that they looked for any means to prevent it. One Wall Street executive lobbied House minority leader Kevin McCarthy to tell Trump the Dow would implode if he canned Fauci. “The markets follow Fauci,” the executive told me. (“Has it been stressful? Uh, yeah,” Fauci told me when I asked him about working for Trump. “This is a very, very stressful situation for everybody, including me.”)

Inside the West Wing, the blame game kicked into high gear. “This is going to be 9/11 and Pearl Harbor combined. People are going to be covering their asses for years,” a former West Wing official told me. A front page New York Times piece on April 11 was widely seen as an effort by Azar’s camp to push back on Trump and Kushner. After the piece ran, Trump installed Michael Caputo, a loyalist and close Roger Stone friend, to be Health and Human Services spokesman.

Even Kushner wasn’t insulated. Trump was enraged that Kushner had oversold Google’s coronavirus testing website and that he’d gotten slammed in the press for promoting an essentially phantom product. “Jared told Trump that Google was doing an entire website that would be up in 72 hours and had 1,100 people working on it 24/7. That’s just a lie,” the source briefed on the internal conversations told me. (A White House official responded: “This is just another false story focused on rumors about palace intrigue instead of the actual aggressive measures President Trump has implemented to keep the American people safe and healthy.”)

The virus was a threat Trump couldn’t bully, and his record of inaction something he couldn’t erase. Later in April, he tried to change the subject, announcing an immigration ban, with little detail about how it would work. Beaches in Florida, bowling alleys and nail salons in Georgia were reopened—magical thinking had reemerged. But beneath the bluster was a darker reality. “He’s paralyzed,” a former official said. Trump reversed course and criticized Georgia’s move to reopen. “This is not what [Trump] likes to do,” added a former West Wing official. “There’s no boogeyman he can attack.”

Trump clung to hope. “The economy will be back in two months, just wait,” he told a friend. But the fall was still a long way away. “If I have any rallies at all, they won’t be until the convention,” he told another friend in mid-March.

The thought seemed to depress him. “The campaign doesn’t matter anymore,” he recently told the friend. “What I do now will determine if I get reelected.” This post has been updated.
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*By my own observation at least Gaberial Sherman has both the most and best sources inside the White House. And you will notice Sherman states things followed by a complete denial by the person and/or other sources. And that is because these sorts of denaials have become a staple of Sherman's reporting where a day or a week or at some point evidence comes out to prove the denials are nothing but lies. Whch Sherman has already documented.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/donald-trump-jared-kushners-two-months-of-magical-thinking

shootersa · May 3, 2020

Um, where is the part about Trump closing travel from China on January 31?
And, you know, the Biden/despicable attacks that he was racist and overreacting and what not?

Didn't fit the narrative?
Copy that.

And your kneeling at the feet of Gabriel Sherman? The guy with all the sources in the Whitehouse?
A quick Google search shows he's got about the same credibility you do.

https://thefederalist.com/2017/02/06/16-fake-news-stories-reporters-have-run-since-trump-won/

On November 22, Gabriel Sherman posted a bombshell report at New York Magazine claiming that “a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” were demanding a recount in three separate states because of “persuasive evidence that [the election] results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.”
It wasn’t until the next day, November 23, that someone threw a little water on the fire. At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver explained that it was “demographics, not hacking” that explained the curious voting numbers. “Anyone making allegations of a possible massive electoral hack should provide proof,” he wrote, “and we can’t find any.” Additionally, Silver pointed out that the New York Magazine article had misrepresented the argument of one of the computer scientists in question.

https://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2017..._xIrprO_cP_doYxhN_6Rr2pZJzoRG753LQkKmSJn92pGf
On last night’s “All In With Chris Hayes,” journalist Gabriel Sherman told of a conversation he had with a “prominent Republican” who said that “they imagine” different scenarios of what Chief of Staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis might do if Trump decided to use nukes on another country.

Focus on “imagine,” as in they’re making it up.

https://twitter.com/PressSec/status...tent-of-the-fake-news-aimed-at-the-president/
Kayleigh McEnany
✔@PressSec
This is 100% fake news. @gabrielsherman did not reach out to me. False & sensational writing on this topic is irresponsible. POTUS has spent plenty of time w the press pool - simply ask ur colleagues. Nothing about your little college essay is funny or true & I want a retraction. https://twitter.com/gabrielsherman/status/1237069021050265602 …
Gabriel Sherman
@gabrielsherman
Trump is total meltdown. He told aides he thinks journalists want to get coronavirus on purpose to spread it to him on Air Force One. My latest:https://www.vanityfair.com/news/202...chief-struggles-to-control-the-covid-19-story …

15.9K
2:06 PM - Mar 9, 2020

stumbler · May 4, 2020

shootersa said: ↑

Um, where is the part about Trump closing travel from China on January 31?
And, you know, the Biden/despicable attacks that he was racist and overreacting and what not?

Didn't fit the narrative?
Copy that.

And your kneeling at the feet of Gabriel Sherman? The guy with all the sources in the Whitehouse?
A quick Google search shows he's got about the same credibility you do.

https://thefederalist.com/2017/02/06/16-fake-news-stories-reporters-have-run-since-trump-won/

On November 22, Gabriel Sherman posted a bombshell report at New York Magazine claiming that “a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” were demanding a recount in three separate states because of “persuasive evidence that [the election] results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.”
It wasn’t until the next day, November 23, that someone threw a little water on the fire. At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver explained that it was “demographics, not hacking” that explained the curious voting numbers. “Anyone making allegations of a possible massive electoral hack should provide proof,” he wrote, “and we can’t find any.” Additionally, Silver pointed out that the New York Magazine article had misrepresented the argument of one of the computer scientists in question.

https://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2017..._xIrprO_cP_doYxhN_6Rr2pZJzoRG753LQkKmSJn92pGf
On last night’s “All In With Chris Hayes,” journalist Gabriel Sherman told of a conversation he had with a “prominent Republican” who said that “they imagine” different scenarios of what Chief of Staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis might do if Trump decided to use nukes on another country.

Focus on “imagine,” as in they’re making it up.

https://twitter.com/PressSec/status/1237107634039410688?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1237107634039410688&ref_url=https://www.independentsentinel.com/video-exposes-the-extent-of-the-fake-news-aimed-at-the-president/
Kayleigh McEnany
✔@PressSec
This is 100% fake news. @gabrielsherman did not reach out to me. False & sensational writing on this topic is irresponsible. POTUS has spent plenty of time w the press pool - simply ask ur colleagues. Nothing about your little college essay is funny or true & I want a retraction. https://twitter.com/gabrielsherman/status/1237069021050265602 …
Gabriel Sherman
@gabrielsherman
Trump is total meltdown. He told aides he thinks journalists want to get coronavirus on purpose to spread it to him on Air Force One. My latest:https://www.vanityfair.com/news/202...chief-struggles-to-control-the-covid-19-story …

15.9K
2:06 PM - Mar 9, 2020
Click to expand...

Thank you for posting an excellent article. I was not aware of computer experts actually approaching the Clinton campaign. And while they could be wrong as FiveThirtyEight points out the problem is we cannot be sure if systems like that have been hacked because they don't have actual paper ballots to go back and look at. Which is why we need a federal law requiring all states to have paper ballot elections. It is the only way to guarantee free and fair elections. And nothing you posted reflects poorly Sherman. And by the way thanks also for calling attention to FIVETHIRTYEIGHT because Nate Silver and his crew also do excellent work.

Anyway back on topic. I heard of a study today that says if Trump had imposed a national lock down one week earlier than the states started to it could have cut the death toll by 60% and if he had done it two weeks earlier it would have cut the death toll by 90%. But instead all he did was impose travel restrictions on SOME PEOPLE coming in and out of China while the virus was being spread by travelers from Europe. And yes fumble fucking around with magical thinking for two months while the virus was spreading from coast to coast is Trump's fault.

And if we weren't talking about the very real deaths of Americans it would be almost funny the way Trump keeps moving the goal posts on the number of deaths. He used an incredibly flawed study promoted by Kushner to claim the death toll might reach 60,000. But now that that model has proven false all Trump has to do is move the goal posts by a few tens of thousands of deaths to try and gaslight the American people that 100,000 dead Americans is doing a great job.

Trump Says 80,000-100,000 Americans Will Die, Calls That a ‘Success’

President Trump on Sunday radically revised upward his estimate of how many Americans would die from the novel coronavirus, saying that anywhere between 80,000 and 100,000 people could die—after he cited a death toll of 50,000 to 60,000 roughly two weeks ago. “That’s one of the reasons we’re successful, if you call losing 80 or 90 thousand people successful,” Trump said in a Fox News town hall at the Lincoln Memorial.

“I used to say 65,000,” the president added, “and now I’m saying 80 or 90 and it goes up and it goes up rapidly, but it’s still going to be, no matter how you look at it, at the lower end of the plane if we did the shutdown.” He later added: “We’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people. That’s a horrible thing.” Trump, who declared in February that the country would see no more than 15 cases in total, has steadily increased his prediction of how many Americans would die from the virus.

Read it at Twitter
Click to expand...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-says-80-90000-americans-will-die-calls-that-a-success?ref=home

thinskin · May 4, 2020

Didn't the tub of lard say that keeping deaths below 60,000 would be a good job.......now that has been revised up to 100,000 deaths.......and Florida has stopped publishing its deaths!

Thinskin

stumbler · May 4, 2020

thinskin said: ↑

Didn't the tub of lard say that keeping deaths below 60,000 would be a good job.......now that has been revised up to 100,000 deaths.......and Florida has stopped publishing its deaths!

Thinskin
Click to expand...

And this is where reality comes to bear. Up until now Trump has been able to just lie and bullshit his way our of anything. But it doesn't work when we are talking about very real deaths. A staggering number of them. And everything Trump does just makes the death toll worse.

Also I am sure sooner or later it will come out that Gov DeSantis is just flat out lying about both the number of COVID 19 cases down in Florida and especially the number of deaths. His figures just don't add up and he is going to extreme lengths to try and keep the press from finding out what is really going on. But I don't think its going to work because they have several really good newspapers in Florida, especially the Miami Herald that won't stop digging until they get to the truth.

stumbler · May 5, 2020

‘Tragic’ failures of Jared Kushner’s COVID-19 efforts outlined in damning whistleblower complaint

Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner has formed his own volunteer-driven “shadow” COVID-19 response group aimed at bringing in private-sector expertise to augment the federal government’s efforts to contain the disease.

However, a damning whistleblower complaint obtained by the Washington Post alleges that Kushner has loaded up his task force with inexperienced volunteers from consulting firms such as Boston Consulting Group, Insight, McKinsey who often have little knowledge in the areas where they are supposed to be helping.

“Americans are facing a crisis of tragic proportions and there is an urgent need for an effective, efficient and bold response,” states the complaint, which was written by a former volunteer on Kushner’s task force and was filed with the House Oversight Committee last month. “From my few weeks as a volunteer, I believe we are falling short. I am writing to alert my representatives of these challenges and to ask that they do everything possible to help front-line health-care workers and other Americans in need.”

The complaint claims that task force members were told to prioritize requests from prominent Fox News hosts, including Brian Kilmeade and Jeanine Pirro, while also stating that volunteers repeatedly failed in their efforts to secure badly needed protective equipment.

Additionally, the Post reports that equipment was often diverted to Kushner’s pet projects that failed to deliver the results that he promised.

“Even as the volunteer group struggled to procure protective equipment, about 30 percent of ‘key supplies,’ including masks, in the national stockpile of emergency medical equipment went toward standing up a separate Kushner-led effort to establish drive-through testing sites nationwide, according to a March internal planning document obtained by The Post and confirmed by one current and one former administration official,” the paper writes. “Kushner had originally promised thousands of testing sites, but only 78 materialized; the stockpile was used to supply 44 of those over five to 10 days, the document said.”

Read the whole report here.
Click to expand...

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/05/tr...-outlined-in-damning-whistleblower-complaint/

stumbler · May 6, 2020

David Muir Presses Trump as He Blames Obama Admin for ‘Bare Cupboard’ of Medical Supplies: What Did You Do to Restock?

President Donald Trump continued to blame the Obama administration in an interview with ABC’s David Muir for leaving them “nothing” ahead of the coronavirus pandemic.

“We didn’t have ventilators, we didn’t have medical equipment, we didn’t have testing. The tests were broken. You saw that. We had broken tests. They left us nothing,” the president said. “And we’ve taken it and we have built an incredible stockpile — a stockpile like we’ve never had before.”

Muir followed up with this question:

“Many people have heard you say that along the way and have wondered though, you know, you’re three years into your first term. You’re now applying for the job again. What did you do when you became president to restock those cupboards that you say were bare?”

“Well, I’ll be honest, I have a lot of things going on,” the president responded.

He did not directly answer Muir’s question and instead proceeded to go on a tangent about his political opponents, saying, “We had a lot of people that refused to allow the country to be successful. They wasted a lot of time on Russia, Russia, Russia. That turned out to be a total hoax. Then they did Ukraine, Ukraine, and that was a total hoax. Then they impeached the president of the United States for absolutely no reason, and we even had a 197-to-nothing vote by the Republicans.”

You can watch above, via ABC.
Click to expand...

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/david-m...-medical-supplies-what-did-you-do-to-restock/

stumbler · May 6, 2020

Donald Trump Boasted Medical Shortages Were Fixed While Officials Fretted About Supplies on Conference Calls

When Donald Trump boasted at a May 1 press conference that America’s ventilator, test kit, and mask shortages were a thing of the past as the nation then topped 60,000 deaths, top federal health and emergency-management officials were privately warning that states were still experiencing shortages of masks, gowns and other medical gear. Politico reports Wednesday that according to a recording of an interagency conference call between FEMA and HHS officials across the country—*one of three the news outlet said it obtained—the authorities also expressed concern that governors moving to reopen their economies while cases were still prevalent threatened to plunge the nation into a new and potentially deadlier chapter of the outbreak that could overwhelm hospitals. “The numbers of deaths definitely will be high,” Daniel Jernigan, director of the Center for Disease Control’s influenza division, said at the start of a May 1 conference call; meanwhile another official said that if all the states moved to lift their social-distancing restrictions, hospitals nationwide could see a surge of new coronavirus cases, creating the potential for severe ventilator shortages within weeks. On a April 24 call, concerns were expressed about testing volumes, with one official saying; “Funding and staff is not an inhibitor. It’s the ability to secure testing supplies and PPE.” A spokesman for White House responded to Politico about the report, saying: “The president has been clear that when the need for PPE arises, the administration has developed an historic public-private partnership designed to secure and deliver these critical supplies to everyone who needs them in record time.”

Read it at Politico
Click to expand...

*The real significance of this is people inside Trump's administration are fighting back against Trump's deadly lies and warning the American people about them by leaking things like this. These were actual tape recordings released to multiple news outlets.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump...d-about-supplies-on-conference-calls?ref=home

stumbler · May 6, 2020

We can actually see this for ourselves if we just look at what Trump did yesterday. First he comes out and says he's ending the COVID 19 task force. Which was news to a lot of them but Pence confirmed it. Then today after seeing that compared to George W Bush's mission accomplished moment he completely reverses and says he never intended to end it.

Trump gets bored and gives up on the pandemic — now thousands more will die

In March, after months of ignoring the looming threat of the novel coronavirus, Donald Trump decided to recast himself in a new role, declaring he was now a “wartime president,” clearly imagining himself in the mold of FDR or, more likely, as Bill Pullman’s presidential character in the 1996 film “Independence Day.”

This article was originally published at Salon

This was a total joke from the beginning, as Trump’s behavior wasn’t hard to predict. As a sociopath and narcissist, Trump would enjoy a stint play-acting as president while doing nothing. But when it began to dawn on him that waging war is like, hard work, he would just drift away, letting the “war” effort fail.

Unsurprisingly, that is what exactly happened. As Heather Digby Parton explains in her Wednesday column for Salon, what has “become clear in the last few days is that the Trump administration has made a decision” to give up any semblance of trying to flatten the curve, stop the spread or do anything meaningful to defeat the coronavirus.

Instead, Parton writes, Trump and his advisers “have apparently decided to let the virus ‘wash over the country’ as Trump wanted to do from the beginning.”

The ostensible reason for pressuring states to “reopen” and for maybe-kinda-sorta winding down the federal coronavirus task force — which, despite the presence of incompetent Trump flunkies, still had some value thanks to actual medical experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx — is that the coronavirus is behind us and the focus needs to be on restarting the economy. (At least for now, Trump has apparently backed away from his threat to ditch the task force permanently.)

Trump made that clear in his press conference Tuesday, telling reporters, “We can’t keep our country closed for the next five years” (which exactly no one was proposing).

When asked about all the people who will die as part of this “reopening,” Trump implied that Americans will be happy to die for his cause, because they’re “warriors.”

Trump has clearly talked himself into the belief that the economy will come roaring back to life as soon as lockdown restrictions are lifted, which is utterly ludicrous. Between the certain further spread of the virus itself and the existing damage to the economy, things aren’t getting better anytime soon.

The timing of this decision is distinctly odd, because while the curve of new cases is finally going down in blue states that took aggressive measures, like New York and California, the virus is starting to explode across the rest of country — which is to say areas that Trump needs to win if he wants to be re-elected (which is clearly the only thing he cares about). This graph from the New York Times gives a sobering glimpse of how the confidence and security felt by many denizens of TrumpLandia is about to go up in smoke.

David Frum ✔ @davidfrum

Trump is bringing death to Red America https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/us/coronavirus-deaths-cases-united-states.html …

3,512
6:34 AM - May 5, 2020
\\

As Greg Sargent laid out in the Washington Post on Monday, some of the swing states and districts that Trump needs to win in 2020 have seen the sharpest incline of cases. Trump’s “reopening” strategy depends heavily on the assumption that the virus would remain concentrated in heavily Democratic cities and states he was never going to win anyway. So it seems like political suicide to abandon the fight right when the voters he most needs will see their regions hit hard.

It’s tempting to imagine that Trump is motivated by some clever political strategy — or by any strategy at all — in making this move now. But it’s probably just that he’s getting bored with this whole coronavirus crisis and, now that things are getting really hard, he’s ready to abandon it and move on. That’s exactly what he did during his entire career in the real estate business — and in his marriages — abandoning one failed venture after another the second things turned rocky. Now he’s doing it to the entire country.

The turning point was almost certainly April 23, the fateful day when Trump, in one of his endless propaganda dumps disguised as “press briefings,” mused aloud about curing COVID-19 by injecting household disinfectants into the human body, framing this as a brilliant possibility that somehow had never occurred to medical science. Unless you’ve been in total seclusion as well as lockdown, you probably experienced the explosion of embarrassing coverage, complete with late night jokes about bleach-drinking and press releases from companies like Lysol advising Americans not to inject their products, because they will kill you.

No matter how desperately Trump and his allies tried to spin it, there was no way to pretending that Trump hadn’t made what may have been the stupidest public utterance of any American president in history — or anyone else, really. Which is saying something in a TV landscape full of real housewives, people who agree to marry someone they’ve never met in person and the first host of “The Apprentice.” (Oh, wait.)

Humiliated, Trump announced he was curtailing the daily briefings, whining on Twitter that they weren’t “worth the time & effort” even though — as he so frequently likes to say — he got “record ratings.”

Many folks, including me, predicted that this tantrum wouldn’t last, because Trump is a terminal narcissist who lives for attention. Indeed, as the New York Times reported on the same day as Lysolgate, the daily briefings — which featured Trump talking for hours, spending most of his time in combative exchanges with journalists, which he clearly felt he was “winning” — were pretty much the only thing Trump was actually doing. The rest of his time was largely spent watching TV to hear people talking about him, tweeting and ranting on the phone to whoever would listen about how he wants more flattering coverage.

Sure enough, Trump’s media boycott was abandoned as swiftly as it was begun, and he’s been giving near-daily press conferences, although he has largely abandoned the pretense and trappings of an official White House briefing. It’s clear that his humiliation at being exposed as an epic dumbass is still bothering him. He whined, somewhat mysteriously, that female reporters who asking him questions about his coronavirus response aren’t “Donna Reed, I can tell you that.”

It’s clear the only value Trump has ever seen in the coronavirus task force was about using it as a pretext to hijack the daily briefings for a spectacle of self-aggrandizement. In psychological terms, the briefings, formerly a source of gratifying narcissistic supply for Trump, are now associated in his mind with narcissistic injury. Trump doesn’t value American lives, only his own ego. Now that the task force no longer serves his ego, he’s lost interest.

Trump has apparently decided that he can now simply declare victory over the virus and will that into reality through sheer strength of personality. On Sunday, in his typical style that is as ridiculous as it is grandiose, he tweeted out this pseudo-biblical nonsense:

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

....And then came a Plague, a great and powerful Plague, and the World was never to be the same again! But America rose from this death and destruction, always remembering its many lost souls, and the lost souls all over the World, and became greater than ever before!

247K
8:43 AM - May 3, 2020

The notion that America “rose,” in the past tense, from the “great and powerful Plague” is silly. With lockdown restrictions ending and cases continuing to rise, it’s more like the plague is just getting started.

But Trump doesn’t care. The illusion that he’s a wartime leader shepherding a scared nation through this crisis was pretty well shattered when everyone started making fun of him for suggesting that pumping ultraviolet light or household cleaning products into the lungs just might be a miracle cure. He misses his rallies and longs to get back to what he really enjoys, which is bashing Democrats and racist trolling.

People are dying, hospitals in many parts of the country are about to face what New York City just went through, and unemployment is soaring. But Donald Trump is bored and unhappy. This coronavirus TV show isn’t any fun for him anymore, and he wants to move on. So he’s abandoning even the pretense that he ever cared about American lives.
Click to expand...

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/05/tr...-on-the-pandemic-now-thousands-more-will-die/

Distant Lover · May 6, 2020

The "mess" Trump is said to have inherited looks like a barracks ready for Sunday inspection when compared with the mess Trump has created after three years of lies, incompetence, and telling us how wonderful he is and how well he is doing.

This is a chart of jobs created per year of presidents from Carter to Obama. Notice that more jobs were created per year under Carter than Reagan, and that Obama outclasses George the Greater and George the Lesser. I do not think Trump's numbers look good now, as unemployment and COVID-19 deaths rise.

Distant Lover · May 6, 2020

stumbler · May 6, 2020

Yea not just no but fuck now. I won't fight for the mad king dictator's incompetence. I will dodge the draft on this one but you Trump supporters go ahead and put your efforts where your mouth is and get right out there.

Trump Says Nation Needs to Accept More Deaths: ‘We Have to Be Warriors’

After acknowledging during his Tuesday ABC News interview that deaths will likely rise by quickly reopening the American economy during the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the *American people needed to be “warriors” when asked if the nation needs to accept more casualties.

“We have to be warriors,” the president said during an Oval Office meeting with health-care officials, none of whom were wearing masks. “We can’t keep our country closed down for years.” The president also said that the virus, which has killed more than 71,000 Americans, is “going to disappear,” a common refrain of his. Current polls reveal that the American public is largely opposed to the reopening of most businesses as confirmed COVID-19 cases continue to spike across the nation.
Click to expand...

*Now who are these warriors Trump is talking about that need to die for the economy and his re-election? Well since it mostly kills people over 60 those are the ones Trump is willing to sacrifice. But since people over 60 also happen to be one of the biggest voting blocks in the country telling them you want them to die for you seems like a bad election strategy.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump...aths-says-people-have-to-be-warriors?ref=home

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