The Latest Injection of Trump Tweets Won’t Cure His Embarrassment
DAVE GILSON
As Americans continued to roll their eyes at his comments about injecting disinfectant to kill the coronavirus, President Donald Trump mainlined a fresh dose of misinformation and grievance into his Twitter stream yesterday.
First, he continued to try to relitigate his widely mocked press briefing on last Thursday, claiming his widely mocked suggestions were not directed at Dr. Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, but William Bryan, the Department of Homeland Security undersecretary for science and technology.
Twit:
Donald J. Trump
"Was just informed that the Fake News from the Thursday White House Press Conference had me speaking & asking questions of Dr. Deborah Birx. Wrong, I was speaking to our Laboratory expert, not Deborah, about sunlight etc. & the CoronaVirus. The Lamestream Media is corrupt & sick!"
Trump did ask Bryan whether UV light could be used to “hit the body” or somehow used “inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way.” But he also addressed Birx directly when he said, “I would like you to speak to the medical doctors to see if there’s any way that you can apply light and heat to cure…Deborah, have you ever heard of that? The heat and the light, relative to certain viruses, yes, but relative to this virus?”
Next, Trump suggested that he’d soured on press briefings because the media “refuses to report the truth of facts accurately.” (By the way, the quotes in the previous paragraph are verbatim from the White House website.) Nearly a month ago, he’d bragged that his daily briefings had made him “a ratings hit.” Now Republicans are worried that his briefings are hurting them politically; one senator told the New York Times “the nightly sessions were so painful he could not bear watching any longer.”
Twit:
Donald J. Trump
"What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!"
The president, who spent weeks pushing an untested malaria drug as a COVID-19 treatment, then prescribed a dose of “common sense.” (On April 5, he’d touted hydroxychloroquine yet again, saying “What do I know? I’m not a doctor. I’m not a doctor. But I have common sense.”)
Twit:
Donald J. Trump
Remember, the Cure can’t be worse than the problem itself. Be careful, be safe, use common sense!""
Finally, Trump claimed that the Democrats and media have falsely accused him of calling the coronavirus pandemic “a Hoax.”
Twit:
Donald J. Trump
"I never said the pandemic was a Hoax! Who would say such a thing? I said that the Do Nothing Democrats, together with their Mainstream Media partners, are the Hoax. They have been called out & embarrassed on this, even admitting they were wrong, but continue to spread the lie!"
Let’s look at the transcript from the president’s rally in North Charleston, South Carolina, on February 28 (italics mine):
So far we have lost nobody to coronavirus in the United States. Nobody. And it doesn’t mean we won’t and we are totally prepared. It doesn’t mean we won’t. But think of it, you hear 35 and 40,000 people [dying from flu] and we’ve lost nobody. You wonder if the press is in hysteria mode… Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it… And this is their new hoax. But you know we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We have 15 people in this massive country and because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that.
If you read that and conclude the president was minimizing the seriousness of an impending public health crisis by accusing the media and Democrats of exaggerating its dangers, perhaps you don’t recognize sarcasm.
April 28, 2020
California farmworkers
“They Cut All of Our Hours”
Despite their designation as essential, California farmworkers are being furloughed.
EILEEN GUO
For the past five years, Juanita*, a resident of the border town of Mexicali, Mexico, has spent the spring and summer seasons in Southern California’s Eastern Coachella Valley, picking grapes, beets, blueberries and bell peppers, and then heading north for similar work in Northern California come July, once Coachella’s daytime temperatures become unbearable—120 degrees Fahrenheit. This year, however, the 66-year-old grandmother finds herself unexpectedly idle. At the end of March, she was working only two days out of six. “They cut all of our hours,” she said, wondering just how much longer she could afford to linger here, waiting for work—and pay.
In California and across the country, agricultural businesses have remained open, classified as “essential.” The farmworkers who are still employed continue to work, despite the lack of protective gear, or unemployment benefits if they fall ill. Farmworkers are especially vulnerable given the difficulty of social distancing in the fields and the underlying health conditions, like asthma, diabetes and long-term exposure to pesticides, associated with agricultural work. Many also share housing and the buses that bring them to and from work.
Coachella Mayor Stephen Hernandez is not surprised by the furloughs. The closure of restaurants, schools and large businesses has affected farms’ bottom lines, and some can’t afford to keep their workers employed. One report, from the National Agriculture Sustainable Coalition, projects that shutdowns of non-essential businesses may cause small farms selling locally to lose up to $688.7 million. Eastern Coachella Valley is “probably another two or three weeks from plowing unsold crops into the ground, as has happened in other parts of the country, Hernandez said.
The Coachella Valley stretches 45 miles from Palm Springs to the Salton Sea. The west side’s mid-century homes draped in blooming bougainvillea and its lush green golf courses vanish as you move to the east, where many of the region’s low-wage workers reside. There, rundown mobile homes and squat abodes appear even smaller against the vast desert and intermittent fields and orchards, which produce 95 percent of the country’s dates and nearly a billion dollars in fruits, vegetables, and other agricultural products.
The western valley is “a place where presidents go to retire,” said Anna Lisa Vargas, a lifelong Coachella Valley resident and community organizer. In the eastern valley, on the other hand, some residents still lack paved roads, sewage systems and municipal water—creating “a Third World within a First World.”
Over 97 percent of Eastern Coachella Valley’s roughly 147,500 residents are Latino, compared to 69.5 percent in Coachella Valley overall, and an estimated 14 percent in the unincorporated communities are undocumented. About a quarter are farmworkers, while another 40 percent work in low-paying jobs in the food, health-care and service industries. Up to half of the eastern valley’s residents live below the federal poverty line, with people in the unincorporated communities making a median income of just $18,700. Foreign-born residents, who work in the fields at higher rates, earn up to a median of $3,000 less.
Even before the pandemic, many lived “paycheck by paycheck,” said Gloria Gomez, the co-founder and executive director of the Galilee Center, a nonprofit located in Mecca. Galilee provides food, clothing, shelter and cash assistance to the area’s neediest residents, many of whom are seniors who still work in the fields, despite their increased risk of contracting the coronavirus. To survive, they have to work, she said. Since December 2017, the Galilee Center has also operated a migrant shelter that accommodates between 75-100 workers nightly. For $5 a night, workers have access to a clean bed, shower, air conditioning, WiFi and three meals a day. Still, Galilee is unable to accommodate everyone, and during the height of the harvest season, some 50 farm workers still sleep on the packed earth of the vacant lot across the street, as they have for decades.
This year, Galilee will be able to house even fewer migrants owing to social distancing guidelines: When beds are placed six feet apart, the shelter can provide only 30 of them. The shelter has set up a separate isolation area for anyone who exhibits COVID-19 symptoms; other preventive measures include temperature and symptoms checks at the door, an earlier curfew, rotating shifts for staff members to limit the number of people in the office, and a full cleanup of the facilities every two hours. “We’re concerned,” Gomez says, “but we’re here to serve,” so she has no plans to close.
The demand for Galilee’s services, meanwhile, has gone up. Its food distribution, which, by early April, had moved to car-only, is now held only once a week to limit the number of large gatherings. Galilee has gone from giving out 250 food baskets before COVID-19, to 700. Even so, it cannot meet the demand.
At first, the coronavirus seemed to be targeting the geographically more mobile communities of the west. But by early April, that trend had reversed, with over half a dozen agricultural workers at a date packinghouse in the Eastern Coachella Valley testing positive. “We know it (the coronavirus) is going to happen at one point or another, but up to right now, we (at the center) have no symptoms,” Gomez said in April. Gomez adds that the center has seen an increase in requests for help in paying rent, utilities and even diapers. At the same time, its own finances are increasingly precarious, with donations dropping 50 percent in March alone. Special COVID funds have helped, however, including a grant from the Desert Healthcare District, while continuing emergency assistance funds have kicked in for one of its partners, the FIND Food Bank.
With the coronavirus entering her community, Dominga, a 20-year resident of Mecca, an unincorporated community in the Eastern Coachella Valley, doesn’t want to go into the fields. Not working is not an option, however. The37-year-old mother of three daughters has worked an average of four or five days, out of a six-day work week, planting and picking red bell peppers, since the coronavirus hit. “We’re only 24-26 people working two fields together, when before just one field needed around 30-32 people,” she said. “With so many people that are unemployed right now, I tell myself that I’m fortunate to be working. I have my daughters, and every day I think about them when I leave.”
Despite their designation as essential, California farmworkers are being furloughed.
EILEEN GUO
For the past five years, Juanita*, a resident of the border town of Mexicali, Mexico, has spent the spring and summer seasons in Southern California’s Eastern Coachella Valley, picking grapes, beets, blueberries and bell peppers, and then heading north for similar work in Northern California come July, once Coachella’s daytime temperatures become unbearable—120 degrees Fahrenheit. This year, however, the 66-year-old grandmother finds herself unexpectedly idle. At the end of March, she was working only two days out of six. “They cut all of our hours,” she said, wondering just how much longer she could afford to linger here, waiting for work—and pay.
In California and across the country, agricultural businesses have remained open, classified as “essential.” The farmworkers who are still employed continue to work, despite the lack of protective gear, or unemployment benefits if they fall ill. Farmworkers are especially vulnerable given the difficulty of social distancing in the fields and the underlying health conditions, like asthma, diabetes and long-term exposure to pesticides, associated with agricultural work. Many also share housing and the buses that bring them to and from work.
Coachella Mayor Stephen Hernandez is not surprised by the furloughs. The closure of restaurants, schools and large businesses has affected farms’ bottom lines, and some can’t afford to keep their workers employed. One report, from the National Agriculture Sustainable Coalition, projects that shutdowns of non-essential businesses may cause small farms selling locally to lose up to $688.7 million. Eastern Coachella Valley is “probably another two or three weeks from plowing unsold crops into the ground, as has happened in other parts of the country, Hernandez said.
The Coachella Valley stretches 45 miles from Palm Springs to the Salton Sea. The west side’s mid-century homes draped in blooming bougainvillea and its lush green golf courses vanish as you move to the east, where many of the region’s low-wage workers reside. There, rundown mobile homes and squat abodes appear even smaller against the vast desert and intermittent fields and orchards, which produce 95 percent of the country’s dates and nearly a billion dollars in fruits, vegetables, and other agricultural products.
The western valley is “a place where presidents go to retire,” said Anna Lisa Vargas, a lifelong Coachella Valley resident and community organizer. In the eastern valley, on the other hand, some residents still lack paved roads, sewage systems and municipal water—creating “a Third World within a First World.”
Over 97 percent of Eastern Coachella Valley’s roughly 147,500 residents are Latino, compared to 69.5 percent in Coachella Valley overall, and an estimated 14 percent in the unincorporated communities are undocumented. About a quarter are farmworkers, while another 40 percent work in low-paying jobs in the food, health-care and service industries. Up to half of the eastern valley’s residents live below the federal poverty line, with people in the unincorporated communities making a median income of just $18,700. Foreign-born residents, who work in the fields at higher rates, earn up to a median of $3,000 less.
Even before the pandemic, many lived “paycheck by paycheck,” said Gloria Gomez, the co-founder and executive director of the Galilee Center, a nonprofit located in Mecca. Galilee provides food, clothing, shelter and cash assistance to the area’s neediest residents, many of whom are seniors who still work in the fields, despite their increased risk of contracting the coronavirus. To survive, they have to work, she said. Since December 2017, the Galilee Center has also operated a migrant shelter that accommodates between 75-100 workers nightly. For $5 a night, workers have access to a clean bed, shower, air conditioning, WiFi and three meals a day. Still, Galilee is unable to accommodate everyone, and during the height of the harvest season, some 50 farm workers still sleep on the packed earth of the vacant lot across the street, as they have for decades.
This year, Galilee will be able to house even fewer migrants owing to social distancing guidelines: When beds are placed six feet apart, the shelter can provide only 30 of them. The shelter has set up a separate isolation area for anyone who exhibits COVID-19 symptoms; other preventive measures include temperature and symptoms checks at the door, an earlier curfew, rotating shifts for staff members to limit the number of people in the office, and a full cleanup of the facilities every two hours. “We’re concerned,” Gomez says, “but we’re here to serve,” so she has no plans to close.
The demand for Galilee’s services, meanwhile, has gone up. Its food distribution, which, by early April, had moved to car-only, is now held only once a week to limit the number of large gatherings. Galilee has gone from giving out 250 food baskets before COVID-19, to 700. Even so, it cannot meet the demand.
At first, the coronavirus seemed to be targeting the geographically more mobile communities of the west. But by early April, that trend had reversed, with over half a dozen agricultural workers at a date packinghouse in the Eastern Coachella Valley testing positive. “We know it (the coronavirus) is going to happen at one point or another, but up to right now, we (at the center) have no symptoms,” Gomez said in April. Gomez adds that the center has seen an increase in requests for help in paying rent, utilities and even diapers. At the same time, its own finances are increasingly precarious, with donations dropping 50 percent in March alone. Special COVID funds have helped, however, including a grant from the Desert Healthcare District, while continuing emergency assistance funds have kicked in for one of its partners, the FIND Food Bank.
With the coronavirus entering her community, Dominga, a 20-year resident of Mecca, an unincorporated community in the Eastern Coachella Valley, doesn’t want to go into the fields. Not working is not an option, however. The37-year-old mother of three daughters has worked an average of four or five days, out of a six-day work week, planting and picking red bell peppers, since the coronavirus hit. “We’re only 24-26 people working two fields together, when before just one field needed around 30-32 people,” she said. “With so many people that are unemployed right now, I tell myself that I’m fortunate to be working. I have my daughters, and every day I think about them when I leave.”
Not this one.
‘This guy hasn’t changed one iota’: Coronavirus or not, it’s the same old Trump
Crises change most presidents. Not this one.
By DANIEL LIPPMAN
President Donald Trump, faced with a death toll of over 50,000 Americans from a pandemic he once said was “totally under control,” is increasingly coping by launching frequent trial balloons of far-fetched ideas to try to end the outbreak and get America back to work.
On Thursday, it was injecting disinfectant into one’s body to get rid of the coronavirus and using sunlight to do the trick, too. (On Friday, after widespread mockery, he claimed he was merely joking.) A week earlier, the president was claiming “total authority” to decide when states reopen only to say later that it was up to governors. Before that, he was touting as a cure-all the malaria pill hydroxychloroquine, despite his health advisers’ concerns that the drug was an unproven and possibly unsafe remedy. He called for “packed churches” for Easter Sunday, a wildly unrealistic timeline that he had to walk back under withering pressure.
Some of Trump’s would-be quick fixes have more grounding in reality. In late March, he bragged that a fast new diagnostic test for the virus was “a whole new ballgame” — and aides rushed to bring it to market. But while impressive, the speedier tests have run into supply bottlenecks, and health experts have warned of unacceptably high error rates.
It’s a pattern that has repeated itself throughout Trump’s presidency in which Trump grasps for new ideas (often by what he sees on television), shortcuts and anything that can deliver hope and high ratings as the clock nears six months to the election. And those who know the president best say that even a crisis that has devastated American families and brought the economy to a standstill has hardly changed him at all.
“He continues to lead by floating trial balloons, gauging how those trial balloons are being received and then adjusting along the way,” said a person close to the White House. “He launches the trial balloons as he sees fit and then the adjustment comes after everyone starts chiming in after being sort of blindsided by the original trial balloon.”
Another frequent motif in Trump’s presidency has returned with a vengeance: blaming others. Under fire for mishandling the outbreak, Trump has lashed out at China, the Obama administration, the “fake news,” the World Health Organization, governors and even his own scientists.
“I think we are seeing that pattern reemerge throughout this crisis,” said David Lapan, a former senior Homeland Security Department official in the Trump administration, “with the president not taking responsibility and trying to again shift blame elsewhere.”
While sometimes soaking in their praise, Trump has frequently slammed governors during the crisis for the quantity of supplies they’ve asked for and, more recently, for reopening states before the worst of the outbreak is behind them.
The Trump administration believes that some governors of states hard-hit by the pandemic have been “two-faced” in how they deal with Trump and the White House, a senior administration official said.“Some of them have acted like a bunch of ungrateful spoiled teenage brats, telling sugar daddy ‘give me more more more’ and basically saying eff you” on TV news shows, said the official, who added that at times Trump has noted the mixed messaging when they thank him on calls the president has with the governors.
Interviews with 11 people who worked closely with Trump or at high levels of the administration gave the president disparate reviews on how he’s handled the crisis, though some are harshly critical.
“He’s performed poorly,” said Guy Snodgrass, former Defense secretary Jim Mattis’ chief speechwriter and communications director and the author of “Holding the Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon with Secretary Mattis.” “He’s president of the United States. During a time of crisis, I believe most Americans want their senior most elected leader to imbue strength, to imbue honesty, to be a source of strength for them.”
“Exaggerating the size of the crowd that came to his inauguration or exaggerating the size at the Fourth of July event, those are annoying, but those aren’t life and death,” added Lapan. “This is a time for serious response and serious communication and not using the opportunity to repeat past patterns of blaming others, of trying to underplay certain things and overplay other things.”
Asked for comment for this story, Deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley said in a statement: “When President Trump said when to reopen the country was the biggest decision he’d make in his entire life – the American people saw a seminal moment that perfectly encapsulated the profoundly difficult decisions he faces every single day. The weight on his shoulders is immeasurable, but his deep love for the American people is what drives him, and our great Nation will emerge from this unprecedented crisis stronger than ever before because of his leadership.”
While former White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump has done a good job handling the virus, he said Trump doesn’t help himself by getting into feuds with the media and with Democratic governors and mayors.
“The briefings are extremely helpful to get information to the American people, and the president is getting a lot of credit for that. His numbers reflected that early on, but when he is fighting with the governors and the media, it’s a distraction from the good work they’re doing,” he said.
A senior administration official defended the briefings by saying they have opened up Trump to an entirely new audience and become “must-see TV and a daily appointment for many Americans.”
Former Trump officials also said a big problem in his response is that he is not relying much on data but instead is using what he’s previously called “his very, very large brain.” At a briefing in mid-April, he pointed to his head when asked the metrics he would use to decide when to reopen the economy.
“He’s a gut guy that doesn’t like a lot of detail on stuff, so that’s why he runs with the hydroxychloroquine thing working because ‘Hey, that’s a good one, I have a good feeling about that,’” said a former senior Trump administration official.
Others are skeptical that Trump’s daily briefings are accomplishing anything positive for him any more and worry that they are backfiring by letting the president engage in his favorite sport: getting into arguments with reporters and attacking the media.
“He’s got two hours of material he’s got to fill every day in his show and will go with things before they’re fully baked,” said the former official. “They’ve kind of outlived their usefulness,” added a former White House official.
Most don’t think Trump, 73, has changed much as a person even with a 9/11-scale death toll every day in recent weeks, a scourge that has felled a close friend and inundated the Queens neighborhood where he grew up.
When asked whether Trump is a different person because of the virus, Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s short-lived communications director, said: “No way. This guy hasn’t changed one iota.”
Scaramucci added, one thing that has stayed consistent with Trump is what he cares about most: himself.
“There’s only one thing that he’s concerned about and you know what that is? It’s ‘TRUMP,’” he said, spelling out the letters for effect. “When he does a news search, he’s searching ‘TRUMP.’ He doesn’t search ‘USA,’ he searches ‘TRUMP.”
Three former officials said Trump is most worried about the economy, because the president believes he cannot win a second term if the U.S. enters a sustained downturn.
Trump studies his base religiously, several noted, and frequently shifts his rhetoric based on where he thinks his most reliable supporters are going.
There is also strong skepticism about whether he’s learned much if anything since the early days of the crisis, when he compared Covid-19 to the flu and predicted it would “disappear” like a “miracle.”
“Most people would say, ‘Yeah I learned from that, I learned not to jump out ahead, or to be so definitive on things’, but I don’t see any evidence of that,” said the former senior administration official. “He’s sort of doubled down [by saying] he’s handled this thing perfectly well and I’m not sure whether he learns in the same way that other people might.”
Republicans close to the White House are worried that Democrats will use Trump’s dismissive early comments against him; some of them are already appearing in early ads by Democratic groups.
In the latest example, this week Trump hauled Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in front of reporters to say he hadn’t meant to warn that an outbreak of the disease in the fall would likely be “worse” — only that it could be made more difficult by the onset of flu season. But the president went further, declaring the virus “might not come back at all,” in comments that could haunt him later.
“Where he’s going to get burned is his initial rhetoric claiming that the disease would never come to the U.S. and it would simply go away,” said a person close to the White House. “Basically, those comments about it being overblown and a media hoax — all of that is going to be a lesson in not shooting off your mouth before you actually know the truth because television ads are going to come fast and furious.”
Trump knows that his legacy largely rests on whether he can get America out of this mess, according to four officials. He is cognizant of the likelihood that if he loses, his handling of the coronavirus will be one of the first things that Americans learn about his presidency 100 years from now, just as Herbert Hoover is known for responding poorly to the Great Depression.
The president also feels some of his staffers haven’t done an adequate job and instead tried to preen for the history books, in particular Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who Trump thinks has leaked a number of things to make himself look like a clairvoyant hero who tried to warn of the dangers from the coronavirus, a senior Trump administration official said.
While Trump usually gets to blow off steam by playing golf and doing political rallies, for weeks, he’s been trapped at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue unable to escape much, although as POLITICO first reported, he’s planning to hit the road again for events around the country.
“He’s reveling in the fact that he can go on television every day on the one hand, but on the other hand he’s confined to the glorified bubble that is the White House,” a former senior White House official said.
As part of his eventual road show, he wants to make sure that the massive federal aid intended for people and small businesses in need is getting to them and not to well-endowed colleges, fancy restaurateurs and publicly traded companies, a senior administration official said.
But Trump is hamstrung by the fact that it will be governors, and millions of Americans themselves — not the frustrated man in the Oval Office — who will largely determine whether the economy recovers robustly by November.
And if there is a larger plan for getting the country out of the mess, his allies aren’t yet seeing it. As one person close to the White House said: “I think people are being hopeful. That’s the strategy.”
Crises change most presidents. Not this one.
By DANIEL LIPPMAN
President Donald Trump, faced with a death toll of over 50,000 Americans from a pandemic he once said was “totally under control,” is increasingly coping by launching frequent trial balloons of far-fetched ideas to try to end the outbreak and get America back to work.
On Thursday, it was injecting disinfectant into one’s body to get rid of the coronavirus and using sunlight to do the trick, too. (On Friday, after widespread mockery, he claimed he was merely joking.) A week earlier, the president was claiming “total authority” to decide when states reopen only to say later that it was up to governors. Before that, he was touting as a cure-all the malaria pill hydroxychloroquine, despite his health advisers’ concerns that the drug was an unproven and possibly unsafe remedy. He called for “packed churches” for Easter Sunday, a wildly unrealistic timeline that he had to walk back under withering pressure.
Some of Trump’s would-be quick fixes have more grounding in reality. In late March, he bragged that a fast new diagnostic test for the virus was “a whole new ballgame” — and aides rushed to bring it to market. But while impressive, the speedier tests have run into supply bottlenecks, and health experts have warned of unacceptably high error rates.
It’s a pattern that has repeated itself throughout Trump’s presidency in which Trump grasps for new ideas (often by what he sees on television), shortcuts and anything that can deliver hope and high ratings as the clock nears six months to the election. And those who know the president best say that even a crisis that has devastated American families and brought the economy to a standstill has hardly changed him at all.
“He continues to lead by floating trial balloons, gauging how those trial balloons are being received and then adjusting along the way,” said a person close to the White House. “He launches the trial balloons as he sees fit and then the adjustment comes after everyone starts chiming in after being sort of blindsided by the original trial balloon.”
Another frequent motif in Trump’s presidency has returned with a vengeance: blaming others. Under fire for mishandling the outbreak, Trump has lashed out at China, the Obama administration, the “fake news,” the World Health Organization, governors and even his own scientists.
“I think we are seeing that pattern reemerge throughout this crisis,” said David Lapan, a former senior Homeland Security Department official in the Trump administration, “with the president not taking responsibility and trying to again shift blame elsewhere.”
While sometimes soaking in their praise, Trump has frequently slammed governors during the crisis for the quantity of supplies they’ve asked for and, more recently, for reopening states before the worst of the outbreak is behind them.
The Trump administration believes that some governors of states hard-hit by the pandemic have been “two-faced” in how they deal with Trump and the White House, a senior administration official said.“Some of them have acted like a bunch of ungrateful spoiled teenage brats, telling sugar daddy ‘give me more more more’ and basically saying eff you” on TV news shows, said the official, who added that at times Trump has noted the mixed messaging when they thank him on calls the president has with the governors.
Interviews with 11 people who worked closely with Trump or at high levels of the administration gave the president disparate reviews on how he’s handled the crisis, though some are harshly critical.
“He’s performed poorly,” said Guy Snodgrass, former Defense secretary Jim Mattis’ chief speechwriter and communications director and the author of “Holding the Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon with Secretary Mattis.” “He’s president of the United States. During a time of crisis, I believe most Americans want their senior most elected leader to imbue strength, to imbue honesty, to be a source of strength for them.”
“Exaggerating the size of the crowd that came to his inauguration or exaggerating the size at the Fourth of July event, those are annoying, but those aren’t life and death,” added Lapan. “This is a time for serious response and serious communication and not using the opportunity to repeat past patterns of blaming others, of trying to underplay certain things and overplay other things.”
Asked for comment for this story, Deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley said in a statement: “When President Trump said when to reopen the country was the biggest decision he’d make in his entire life – the American people saw a seminal moment that perfectly encapsulated the profoundly difficult decisions he faces every single day. The weight on his shoulders is immeasurable, but his deep love for the American people is what drives him, and our great Nation will emerge from this unprecedented crisis stronger than ever before because of his leadership.”
While former White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump has done a good job handling the virus, he said Trump doesn’t help himself by getting into feuds with the media and with Democratic governors and mayors.
“The briefings are extremely helpful to get information to the American people, and the president is getting a lot of credit for that. His numbers reflected that early on, but when he is fighting with the governors and the media, it’s a distraction from the good work they’re doing,” he said.
A senior administration official defended the briefings by saying they have opened up Trump to an entirely new audience and become “must-see TV and a daily appointment for many Americans.”
Former Trump officials also said a big problem in his response is that he is not relying much on data but instead is using what he’s previously called “his very, very large brain.” At a briefing in mid-April, he pointed to his head when asked the metrics he would use to decide when to reopen the economy.
“He’s a gut guy that doesn’t like a lot of detail on stuff, so that’s why he runs with the hydroxychloroquine thing working because ‘Hey, that’s a good one, I have a good feeling about that,’” said a former senior Trump administration official.
Others are skeptical that Trump’s daily briefings are accomplishing anything positive for him any more and worry that they are backfiring by letting the president engage in his favorite sport: getting into arguments with reporters and attacking the media.
“He’s got two hours of material he’s got to fill every day in his show and will go with things before they’re fully baked,” said the former official. “They’ve kind of outlived their usefulness,” added a former White House official.
Most don’t think Trump, 73, has changed much as a person even with a 9/11-scale death toll every day in recent weeks, a scourge that has felled a close friend and inundated the Queens neighborhood where he grew up.
When asked whether Trump is a different person because of the virus, Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s short-lived communications director, said: “No way. This guy hasn’t changed one iota.”
Scaramucci added, one thing that has stayed consistent with Trump is what he cares about most: himself.
“There’s only one thing that he’s concerned about and you know what that is? It’s ‘TRUMP,’” he said, spelling out the letters for effect. “When he does a news search, he’s searching ‘TRUMP.’ He doesn’t search ‘USA,’ he searches ‘TRUMP.”
Three former officials said Trump is most worried about the economy, because the president believes he cannot win a second term if the U.S. enters a sustained downturn.
Trump studies his base religiously, several noted, and frequently shifts his rhetoric based on where he thinks his most reliable supporters are going.
There is also strong skepticism about whether he’s learned much if anything since the early days of the crisis, when he compared Covid-19 to the flu and predicted it would “disappear” like a “miracle.”
“Most people would say, ‘Yeah I learned from that, I learned not to jump out ahead, or to be so definitive on things’, but I don’t see any evidence of that,” said the former senior administration official. “He’s sort of doubled down [by saying] he’s handled this thing perfectly well and I’m not sure whether he learns in the same way that other people might.”
Republicans close to the White House are worried that Democrats will use Trump’s dismissive early comments against him; some of them are already appearing in early ads by Democratic groups.
In the latest example, this week Trump hauled Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in front of reporters to say he hadn’t meant to warn that an outbreak of the disease in the fall would likely be “worse” — only that it could be made more difficult by the onset of flu season. But the president went further, declaring the virus “might not come back at all,” in comments that could haunt him later.
“Where he’s going to get burned is his initial rhetoric claiming that the disease would never come to the U.S. and it would simply go away,” said a person close to the White House. “Basically, those comments about it being overblown and a media hoax — all of that is going to be a lesson in not shooting off your mouth before you actually know the truth because television ads are going to come fast and furious.”
Trump knows that his legacy largely rests on whether he can get America out of this mess, according to four officials. He is cognizant of the likelihood that if he loses, his handling of the coronavirus will be one of the first things that Americans learn about his presidency 100 years from now, just as Herbert Hoover is known for responding poorly to the Great Depression.
The president also feels some of his staffers haven’t done an adequate job and instead tried to preen for the history books, in particular Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who Trump thinks has leaked a number of things to make himself look like a clairvoyant hero who tried to warn of the dangers from the coronavirus, a senior Trump administration official said.
While Trump usually gets to blow off steam by playing golf and doing political rallies, for weeks, he’s been trapped at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue unable to escape much, although as POLITICO first reported, he’s planning to hit the road again for events around the country.
“He’s reveling in the fact that he can go on television every day on the one hand, but on the other hand he’s confined to the glorified bubble that is the White House,” a former senior White House official said.
As part of his eventual road show, he wants to make sure that the massive federal aid intended for people and small businesses in need is getting to them and not to well-endowed colleges, fancy restaurateurs and publicly traded companies, a senior administration official said.
But Trump is hamstrung by the fact that it will be governors, and millions of Americans themselves — not the frustrated man in the Oval Office — who will largely determine whether the economy recovers robustly by November.
And if there is a larger plan for getting the country out of the mess, his allies aren’t yet seeing it. As one person close to the White House said: “I think people are being hopeful. That’s the strategy.”
Confusing coronavirus theory???? Really? You think so???
Trump offered a confusing coronavirus theory. Conservative pundits explained it for him.
The evolution of Trump’s idea that light might be used inside patients shows the symbiotic relationship between the president and his boosters.
By TINA NGUYEN
For once, President Donald Trump’s latest tossed-out suggestion for a way to combat coronavirus — injecting ultraviolet rays — did not originate from a Fox News guest, a viral Twitter thread or an article on a conservative website.
Instead, the process worked in reverse. First, Trump offered a muddled but hopeful theory — that one could somehow insert light or medicine into the lungs — and conservative and Trump-friendly media outlets started trying to explain and boost it. They flagged obscure research papers and said the president was simply attempting to raise the country’s spirits. They tried to discredit mainstream media coverage of the comments.
“Trump used the word ‘inject’ but what he meant was using a process — which he left ‘medical doctors’ to define — in which patients’ lungs might be cleared of the virus, given new knowledge about its response to light and other factors,” wrote Joel Pollak in an article posted on Breitbart hours after Trump made his remarks.
It’s the latest example of the symbiotic relationship between the president and his media boosters during the coronavirus. At times, conservative outlets have promoted ideas, such as the possibility that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine might help cure the disease, that Trump has then adopted. Other times, Trump throws out his own theories, and conservative outlets swiftly parrot them and defend the president.
The process has played out over the past several weeks, as Trump’s ad hoc attempt at promoting potential coronavirus cures has pivoted from a prediction that summertime temperatures might help eradicate the disease, to the hydroxychloroquine saga to the latest — ultraviolet light therapy.
The process started Thursday night when Trump offered his own take on a presentation explaining that a spectrum of ultraviolet rays could reduce the half-life of the coronavirus while airborne or on hard surfaces.
“Supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you could do either through the skin or in some other way?” Trump asked the official giving the presentation. “Is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs.”
The medical community was quick to offer an answer: You can’t do that. UV lights would destroy human tissue.
“[We’re] talking about light waves at low wavelengths that contain a lot of energy and that energy has been shown in many studies to be extremely damaging to human tissues in particular the skin and the eyes,” Jim Malley, an expert on UV light and a professor at the University of New Hampshire, said in a statement.
As the media started picking up on Trump’s remarks, conservative voices started explaining and boosting Trump’s intent.
In addition to the Breitbart article, other Trump-supporting personalities like Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams started elevating articles about dubious technologies and news releases about inventions that had yet to be backed by research.
Adams and several other right-wing personalities floated the possibility that Trump had read a news release from Aytu Bioscience, a publicly traded biotech company based out of Colorado, announcing a partnership with Cedars-Sinai, a top medical research center, to work on a therapy that involved treating coronavirus patients via injecting UV-A rays, a subspectrum of ultraviolet light, into the lungs via a catheter tube.
The news release was packed with extensive legal disclaimers cautioning that any forward-looking statements indicating excitement were “just predictions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual events or results to differ materially.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Cedars-Sinai said the technology was in the preclinical phase: “The technology has not been tested or used on patients.”
The Food and Drug Administration declined to comment about the company or the technology.
Others insisted the president was merely trying to provide hope to Americans, even with his impulsive suggestions.
“The majority of MAGA knows he is talking about hopes for new treatments for the virus. I’m not a doctor myself so the only thing I self-medicate with is memes,” said Jack Posobiec, a correspondent with OANN, a conservative network that Trump frequently praises.
Jim Hanson, a Trump-friendly commentator and the president of the right-wing think tank Security Studies Group, said that Trump’s observers across the political spectrum are constantly engaged in this type of Trump kremlinology.
“He's going to say some things that are a little bit off the cuff, you know, or beyond the cuff,” Hanson said. “So I'd think people try to figure it out and cover for him and say, well this is what he may have met. This is what he may be trying to say.”
The president's medical advisers expressed a desire for the media to spend less time dissecting the president's extemporaneous remarks.
“It bothers me that this is still in the news cycle, because I think we’re missing the bigger pieces of what we need to be doing as an American people to continue to protect one another,” said Dr. Deborah Birx, a global health expert and one of the leading medical voices on the White House coronavirus task force, in a CNN interview on Sunday. “As a scientist and a public health official and a researcher, sometimes I worry that we don’t get the information to the American people that they need when we continue to bring up something that was from Thursday night.”
Hanson defended the president’s right to offer such free-wheeling assessments from the White House podium.
“The idea of him up front on live TV spitballing ideas, taking pot shots at people and making sure that nobody feels too comfortable in a situation where everybody needs to be on their a game, is a leadership style that I have seen be very effective in crisis,” he said.
True to form, Trump forced everyone to pivot again on Friday when he offered his own explanation: He had meant his remarks sarcastically.
“I was asking a sarcastic, and a very sarcastic question, to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside,” Trump said during a news conference in the Oval Office the next day. “But it does kill it.”
Breitbart soon edited Pollack’s piece to clarify that it was now “opinion,” adding that it had been “further updated to reflect President Trump’s statement this morning that he was being sarcastic. We apologize for the error, and you are welcome for all the opportunities to dunk on us on Twitter.”
It’s nearly the exact opposite phenomenon of what happened with Trump and his base’s brief flirtation with hydroxychloroquine. That saga began when a fringe bitcoin investor posed as a Stanford researcher, promoted the anti-malarial drug as a potential game-changer by citing several flawed early-stage studies and then hyped the drug on several right-wing media outlets.
Trump was soon touting the drug himself from the White House podium, encouraging people to take it and even calling it “the hydroxy” during appearances. “If it were me, in fact, I might do it anyway,” he told reporters on April 11. “I may take it. … I have to ask my doctors about that. But I may take it.”
In turn, many conservative pundits stumped for hydroxychloroquine, causing a massive surge in demand that created shortages for those who were prescribed the drug for ailments like lupus or rheumatoid arthritis.
Then, in recent days, some signs have emerged that hydroxychloroquine carries serious potential side effects in coronavirus patients and may not be effective fighting the disease.
A National Institutes of Health-backed study showed that coronavirus patients treated with hydroxychloroquine died at a higher rate than those who did not receive the drug. Two separate studies conducted in Brazil and France were abruptly halted when researchers began observing an increase in heart problems among subjects receiving a higher dose of chloroquine.
On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration officially cautioned doctors from using hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine in treating patients outside hospitals or clinical settings, citing the increased cardiac risks. “[W]e would like to remind health care professionals and patients of the known risks associated with both hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine,” the agency said.
Amid these developments, Trump has quietly backed down from his hydroxychloroquine endorsement. He last mentioned it during a news briefing last week.
To his followers, the back-and-forth is simply another of Trump’s virtues.
“That's his style. He's been that way forever. And a lot of people hate it,” said Hanson. “OK. I get that. It's not the old-school presidential style, but it's him, and I think the idea that a bunch of people are confused and think Trump's a doctor or a scientist, and the pronouncements that come out of his mouth are prescriptions that they should follow, is absurd.”
The evolution of Trump’s idea that light might be used inside patients shows the symbiotic relationship between the president and his boosters.
By TINA NGUYEN
For once, President Donald Trump’s latest tossed-out suggestion for a way to combat coronavirus — injecting ultraviolet rays — did not originate from a Fox News guest, a viral Twitter thread or an article on a conservative website.
Instead, the process worked in reverse. First, Trump offered a muddled but hopeful theory — that one could somehow insert light or medicine into the lungs — and conservative and Trump-friendly media outlets started trying to explain and boost it. They flagged obscure research papers and said the president was simply attempting to raise the country’s spirits. They tried to discredit mainstream media coverage of the comments.
“Trump used the word ‘inject’ but what he meant was using a process — which he left ‘medical doctors’ to define — in which patients’ lungs might be cleared of the virus, given new knowledge about its response to light and other factors,” wrote Joel Pollak in an article posted on Breitbart hours after Trump made his remarks.
It’s the latest example of the symbiotic relationship between the president and his media boosters during the coronavirus. At times, conservative outlets have promoted ideas, such as the possibility that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine might help cure the disease, that Trump has then adopted. Other times, Trump throws out his own theories, and conservative outlets swiftly parrot them and defend the president.
The process has played out over the past several weeks, as Trump’s ad hoc attempt at promoting potential coronavirus cures has pivoted from a prediction that summertime temperatures might help eradicate the disease, to the hydroxychloroquine saga to the latest — ultraviolet light therapy.
The process started Thursday night when Trump offered his own take on a presentation explaining that a spectrum of ultraviolet rays could reduce the half-life of the coronavirus while airborne or on hard surfaces.
“Supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you could do either through the skin or in some other way?” Trump asked the official giving the presentation. “Is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs.”
The medical community was quick to offer an answer: You can’t do that. UV lights would destroy human tissue.
“[We’re] talking about light waves at low wavelengths that contain a lot of energy and that energy has been shown in many studies to be extremely damaging to human tissues in particular the skin and the eyes,” Jim Malley, an expert on UV light and a professor at the University of New Hampshire, said in a statement.
As the media started picking up on Trump’s remarks, conservative voices started explaining and boosting Trump’s intent.
In addition to the Breitbart article, other Trump-supporting personalities like Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams started elevating articles about dubious technologies and news releases about inventions that had yet to be backed by research.
Adams and several other right-wing personalities floated the possibility that Trump had read a news release from Aytu Bioscience, a publicly traded biotech company based out of Colorado, announcing a partnership with Cedars-Sinai, a top medical research center, to work on a therapy that involved treating coronavirus patients via injecting UV-A rays, a subspectrum of ultraviolet light, into the lungs via a catheter tube.
The news release was packed with extensive legal disclaimers cautioning that any forward-looking statements indicating excitement were “just predictions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual events or results to differ materially.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Cedars-Sinai said the technology was in the preclinical phase: “The technology has not been tested or used on patients.”
The Food and Drug Administration declined to comment about the company or the technology.
Others insisted the president was merely trying to provide hope to Americans, even with his impulsive suggestions.
“The majority of MAGA knows he is talking about hopes for new treatments for the virus. I’m not a doctor myself so the only thing I self-medicate with is memes,” said Jack Posobiec, a correspondent with OANN, a conservative network that Trump frequently praises.
Jim Hanson, a Trump-friendly commentator and the president of the right-wing think tank Security Studies Group, said that Trump’s observers across the political spectrum are constantly engaged in this type of Trump kremlinology.
“He's going to say some things that are a little bit off the cuff, you know, or beyond the cuff,” Hanson said. “So I'd think people try to figure it out and cover for him and say, well this is what he may have met. This is what he may be trying to say.”
The president's medical advisers expressed a desire for the media to spend less time dissecting the president's extemporaneous remarks.
“It bothers me that this is still in the news cycle, because I think we’re missing the bigger pieces of what we need to be doing as an American people to continue to protect one another,” said Dr. Deborah Birx, a global health expert and one of the leading medical voices on the White House coronavirus task force, in a CNN interview on Sunday. “As a scientist and a public health official and a researcher, sometimes I worry that we don’t get the information to the American people that they need when we continue to bring up something that was from Thursday night.”
Hanson defended the president’s right to offer such free-wheeling assessments from the White House podium.
“The idea of him up front on live TV spitballing ideas, taking pot shots at people and making sure that nobody feels too comfortable in a situation where everybody needs to be on their a game, is a leadership style that I have seen be very effective in crisis,” he said.
True to form, Trump forced everyone to pivot again on Friday when he offered his own explanation: He had meant his remarks sarcastically.
“I was asking a sarcastic, and a very sarcastic question, to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside,” Trump said during a news conference in the Oval Office the next day. “But it does kill it.”
Breitbart soon edited Pollack’s piece to clarify that it was now “opinion,” adding that it had been “further updated to reflect President Trump’s statement this morning that he was being sarcastic. We apologize for the error, and you are welcome for all the opportunities to dunk on us on Twitter.”
It’s nearly the exact opposite phenomenon of what happened with Trump and his base’s brief flirtation with hydroxychloroquine. That saga began when a fringe bitcoin investor posed as a Stanford researcher, promoted the anti-malarial drug as a potential game-changer by citing several flawed early-stage studies and then hyped the drug on several right-wing media outlets.
Trump was soon touting the drug himself from the White House podium, encouraging people to take it and even calling it “the hydroxy” during appearances. “If it were me, in fact, I might do it anyway,” he told reporters on April 11. “I may take it. … I have to ask my doctors about that. But I may take it.”
In turn, many conservative pundits stumped for hydroxychloroquine, causing a massive surge in demand that created shortages for those who were prescribed the drug for ailments like lupus or rheumatoid arthritis.
Then, in recent days, some signs have emerged that hydroxychloroquine carries serious potential side effects in coronavirus patients and may not be effective fighting the disease.
A National Institutes of Health-backed study showed that coronavirus patients treated with hydroxychloroquine died at a higher rate than those who did not receive the drug. Two separate studies conducted in Brazil and France were abruptly halted when researchers began observing an increase in heart problems among subjects receiving a higher dose of chloroquine.
On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration officially cautioned doctors from using hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine in treating patients outside hospitals or clinical settings, citing the increased cardiac risks. “[W]e would like to remind health care professionals and patients of the known risks associated with both hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine,” the agency said.
Amid these developments, Trump has quietly backed down from his hydroxychloroquine endorsement. He last mentioned it during a news briefing last week.
To his followers, the back-and-forth is simply another of Trump’s virtues.
“That's his style. He's been that way forever. And a lot of people hate it,” said Hanson. “OK. I get that. It's not the old-school presidential style, but it's him, and I think the idea that a bunch of people are confused and think Trump's a doctor or a scientist, and the pronouncements that come out of his mouth are prescriptions that they should follow, is absurd.”
2020 vote-by-mail
‘Republicans need to get serious’: 2020 vote-by-mail battle heats up
Some party strategists fear the GOP is not as well-prepared as Democrats for the spike in voting by mail coming under coronavirus.
By ELENA SCHNEIDER and JAMES ARKIN
Coronavirus has campaigns rushing to put voting by mail at the center of their general election strategies — and some Republicans worry they’ve already fallen behind, as President Donald Trump dismisses the method and drives doubt about mail voting among the GOP base.
Multimillion dollar programs urging mail voting in November are already coming together, as both parties envision a social-distancing election featuring a spike in absentee ballots, according to interviews with more than a dozen campaign strategists, party committees and outside groups. Organizing Together, a field-focused group founded by Obama alumni, is partnering with Priorities USA, the Democratic super PAC blessed by Joe Biden’s campaign, to air digital ads in battleground states educating voters on how to cast ballots by mail. The Democratic National Committee called vote-by-mail programs a top priority.
But while conservative campaigns and groups like Americans for Prosperity are planning to pump more spending into their own mail programs to drive turnout, there is growing concern among Republicans that this month’s Wisconsin elections — which saw Democrats capture a state Supreme Court seat after pivoting aggressively to encourage supporters to vote by mail — demonstrate a lack of Republican readiness to wage a campaign dominated by absentee ballots.
One Republican consulting firm is already developing models that forecast voters’ interest in (or skepticism of) voting by mail, while another GOP firm sent a memo to campaigns urging them that “now is the time to push early and absentee voting.”
“Wisconsin was the stress test on this issue, and it’s clear that Republicans need to get serious,” said one Wisconsin Republican, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. This Republican acknowledged the party was outmatched by Democrats’ efforts on chasing down ballots. “We have to overcome our instinctive hesitation and become more effective at it.”
The hesitation is being driven from the top. Trump has dismissed mail voting as ripe for fraud, even though studies have found that voter fraud is rare. “Mail ballots, they cheat. Mail ballots are very dangerous for this country because of cheaters,” Trump said during a White House briefing earlier this month.
GOP campaign professionals largely know they can’t abandon it amid a pandemic — but they also know how important it is to the base to stick with the president.
“The instruction manual says, ‘Don’t publicly disagree with the president, but do whatever you need to do,’” said former Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.). “Certainly in Florida, I can assure you, the Republican Party and all Republican campaigns are going to be pursuing mail voting very aggressively.”
Operatives are focusing on the 34 states where registered voters can request an absentee ballot for any reason, particularly those states that only recently eased those requirements, like key battlegrounds Michigan and Pennsylvania. They pointed to the evidence out of Wisconsin, where more than two-thirds of voters cast ballots by mail even without any changes to election administration policy. Michigan and Pennsylvania could see similar jumps in mail-ballot participation depending on social-distancing requirements this fall.
“We’ll certainly see a much higher percentage of voting by mail [in 2020] than we saw in November 2016, which was less than 30 percent,” said Tanya Bjork, Organizing Together’s Wisconsin state director. “Groups like us are going to be leaning into getting people to vote by mail more aggressively.”
But voters in Michigan or Pennsylvania, new to the loosened absentee system, need to be educated on it, said John Brabender, a Republican strategist based in Pennsylvania. He said it “changes costs, it changes targeting, it changes timing of messages, and it goes from voter persuasion to also voter education.”
“Wisconsin was a wake-up call, and we’d better learn from it,” said Brabender, who is working on several all-mail Republican primaries slated for June.
Former National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Davis said the party’s “assumption is that mail-in ballots help Democrats, and that’ll be true until Republicans figure out how to deal with it,” adding that “the problem is that [Republicans] are not used to employing this.”
In some states, little is likely to change. In two key Senate states — Colorado, which has universal vote by mail, and Arizona, where a substantial portion of the electorate vote by mail — campaigns were already focused on these tactics.
“I think there’s a wrong mythology that it’s bad for Republicans,” said Josh Penry, a Republican strategist based in Colorado, which moved to an all-mail voting system in 2013. Penry pointed to state legislative victories for Republicans in recent cycles on the strength of their mail programs.
And nationally, Republican campaigns are quietly moving along with plans to encourage their voters to take advantage of voting by mail in key states.
Campaigns could use primaries as “beta test programs” for November, while there are also “a lot of conversations at the party level to ensure that campaigns are preparing themselves,” said Josh Holmes, a top adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
“Most campaigns have some element of ballot chasing and they have some level of expertise in it,” Holmes said. “It's just about scaling it up.”
In both parties, best practices from states accustomed to vote-by-mail will likely be adopted elsewhere.
“Vote-by-mail will be a big piece of what we do in the states” in 2020, said Ashley Walker, national campaigns director for For Our Future, a progressive organization that does field organizing work in battleground states. She said the group will replicate its “best practices” in states like Florida, where a third of voters mail in their ballots, to states where it’s not as part of the culture, “educating voters on how they can do it in this moment,” she said.
Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips said his group is “absolutely going to up the percentage of dollars that go into absentee and early voting,” where they run grassroots programs in dozens of competitive congressional races. Phillips said their own program in Wisconsin was successful in getting their identified voters to request and complete absentee ballots.
While there is uncertainty for conditions in November, there is a heightened urgency for candidates facing primaries soon. Some Democratic candidates backed by the national party, including Sara Gideon in Maine and Theresa Greenfield in Iowa, have summer primaries and have used social media and dedicated web pages to encourage their voters to request absentee ballots and educate them on the process.
Sarah Riggs Amico, one of the Democrats in Georgia’s June Senate primary, recently updated her website to include a guide to absentee voting by mail. Teresa Tomlinson, another Democrat in the primary, said her campaign is pressing voters about returning absentee ballot requests, which were mailed to all the state’s voters. She said in an interview that explaining the mechanics of absentee voting was “critically important” — the same message primary rival Jon Ossoff told campaign volunteers via video conference earlier this month.
“Our field team is reaching out to every voter who has requested a Democratic absentee ballot, and we’re encouraging all our supporters to vote by mail,” said Ellen Foster, Ossoff’s campaign manager.
For campaigns, shifting to a heavy emphasis on vote-by-mail will scramble spending schedules and expand the length of time they need to be communicating with voters. It also requires new tactics for picking up ballots, as volunteers may not be able to door-knock for ballot retrieval — a strategy allowed in some states.
“You move up your spending, use more of your money sooner,” said Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist. But he said for most campaigns, those changes will come in the summer, when it’s “clear what the rules of engagement” will be in November.
In the meantime, operatives stress that down-ballot campaigns should prepare early and not rely on national organizations to fill the gaps on field work, particularly in House races outside the presidential battleground states. IMGE, a Republican digital firm, drafted a memo encouraging candidates to push early and absentee voting by having draft emails, social media posts and phone messages ready in advance of potential changes in election details, and to “go back to the drawing board” on get out the vote, investing in tutorials explaining new processes to voters.
“As a down-ballot race, you can’t control the movement of a nationwide vote-by-mail effort,” said Samantha Steelman, an organizing director for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign who is advising House campaigns to have those materials ready. “That’s why it’s critical for campaigns at all levels to start educating voters now on their voting options in their state and not wait for national groups.”
Some party strategists fear the GOP is not as well-prepared as Democrats for the spike in voting by mail coming under coronavirus.
By ELENA SCHNEIDER and JAMES ARKIN
Coronavirus has campaigns rushing to put voting by mail at the center of their general election strategies — and some Republicans worry they’ve already fallen behind, as President Donald Trump dismisses the method and drives doubt about mail voting among the GOP base.
Multimillion dollar programs urging mail voting in November are already coming together, as both parties envision a social-distancing election featuring a spike in absentee ballots, according to interviews with more than a dozen campaign strategists, party committees and outside groups. Organizing Together, a field-focused group founded by Obama alumni, is partnering with Priorities USA, the Democratic super PAC blessed by Joe Biden’s campaign, to air digital ads in battleground states educating voters on how to cast ballots by mail. The Democratic National Committee called vote-by-mail programs a top priority.
But while conservative campaigns and groups like Americans for Prosperity are planning to pump more spending into their own mail programs to drive turnout, there is growing concern among Republicans that this month’s Wisconsin elections — which saw Democrats capture a state Supreme Court seat after pivoting aggressively to encourage supporters to vote by mail — demonstrate a lack of Republican readiness to wage a campaign dominated by absentee ballots.
One Republican consulting firm is already developing models that forecast voters’ interest in (or skepticism of) voting by mail, while another GOP firm sent a memo to campaigns urging them that “now is the time to push early and absentee voting.”
“Wisconsin was the stress test on this issue, and it’s clear that Republicans need to get serious,” said one Wisconsin Republican, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. This Republican acknowledged the party was outmatched by Democrats’ efforts on chasing down ballots. “We have to overcome our instinctive hesitation and become more effective at it.”
The hesitation is being driven from the top. Trump has dismissed mail voting as ripe for fraud, even though studies have found that voter fraud is rare. “Mail ballots, they cheat. Mail ballots are very dangerous for this country because of cheaters,” Trump said during a White House briefing earlier this month.
GOP campaign professionals largely know they can’t abandon it amid a pandemic — but they also know how important it is to the base to stick with the president.
“The instruction manual says, ‘Don’t publicly disagree with the president, but do whatever you need to do,’” said former Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.). “Certainly in Florida, I can assure you, the Republican Party and all Republican campaigns are going to be pursuing mail voting very aggressively.”
Operatives are focusing on the 34 states where registered voters can request an absentee ballot for any reason, particularly those states that only recently eased those requirements, like key battlegrounds Michigan and Pennsylvania. They pointed to the evidence out of Wisconsin, where more than two-thirds of voters cast ballots by mail even without any changes to election administration policy. Michigan and Pennsylvania could see similar jumps in mail-ballot participation depending on social-distancing requirements this fall.
“We’ll certainly see a much higher percentage of voting by mail [in 2020] than we saw in November 2016, which was less than 30 percent,” said Tanya Bjork, Organizing Together’s Wisconsin state director. “Groups like us are going to be leaning into getting people to vote by mail more aggressively.”
But voters in Michigan or Pennsylvania, new to the loosened absentee system, need to be educated on it, said John Brabender, a Republican strategist based in Pennsylvania. He said it “changes costs, it changes targeting, it changes timing of messages, and it goes from voter persuasion to also voter education.”
“Wisconsin was a wake-up call, and we’d better learn from it,” said Brabender, who is working on several all-mail Republican primaries slated for June.
Former National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Davis said the party’s “assumption is that mail-in ballots help Democrats, and that’ll be true until Republicans figure out how to deal with it,” adding that “the problem is that [Republicans] are not used to employing this.”
In some states, little is likely to change. In two key Senate states — Colorado, which has universal vote by mail, and Arizona, where a substantial portion of the electorate vote by mail — campaigns were already focused on these tactics.
“I think there’s a wrong mythology that it’s bad for Republicans,” said Josh Penry, a Republican strategist based in Colorado, which moved to an all-mail voting system in 2013. Penry pointed to state legislative victories for Republicans in recent cycles on the strength of their mail programs.
And nationally, Republican campaigns are quietly moving along with plans to encourage their voters to take advantage of voting by mail in key states.
Campaigns could use primaries as “beta test programs” for November, while there are also “a lot of conversations at the party level to ensure that campaigns are preparing themselves,” said Josh Holmes, a top adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
“Most campaigns have some element of ballot chasing and they have some level of expertise in it,” Holmes said. “It's just about scaling it up.”
In both parties, best practices from states accustomed to vote-by-mail will likely be adopted elsewhere.
“Vote-by-mail will be a big piece of what we do in the states” in 2020, said Ashley Walker, national campaigns director for For Our Future, a progressive organization that does field organizing work in battleground states. She said the group will replicate its “best practices” in states like Florida, where a third of voters mail in their ballots, to states where it’s not as part of the culture, “educating voters on how they can do it in this moment,” she said.
Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips said his group is “absolutely going to up the percentage of dollars that go into absentee and early voting,” where they run grassroots programs in dozens of competitive congressional races. Phillips said their own program in Wisconsin was successful in getting their identified voters to request and complete absentee ballots.
While there is uncertainty for conditions in November, there is a heightened urgency for candidates facing primaries soon. Some Democratic candidates backed by the national party, including Sara Gideon in Maine and Theresa Greenfield in Iowa, have summer primaries and have used social media and dedicated web pages to encourage their voters to request absentee ballots and educate them on the process.
Sarah Riggs Amico, one of the Democrats in Georgia’s June Senate primary, recently updated her website to include a guide to absentee voting by mail. Teresa Tomlinson, another Democrat in the primary, said her campaign is pressing voters about returning absentee ballot requests, which were mailed to all the state’s voters. She said in an interview that explaining the mechanics of absentee voting was “critically important” — the same message primary rival Jon Ossoff told campaign volunteers via video conference earlier this month.
“Our field team is reaching out to every voter who has requested a Democratic absentee ballot, and we’re encouraging all our supporters to vote by mail,” said Ellen Foster, Ossoff’s campaign manager.
For campaigns, shifting to a heavy emphasis on vote-by-mail will scramble spending schedules and expand the length of time they need to be communicating with voters. It also requires new tactics for picking up ballots, as volunteers may not be able to door-knock for ballot retrieval — a strategy allowed in some states.
“You move up your spending, use more of your money sooner,” said Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist. But he said for most campaigns, those changes will come in the summer, when it’s “clear what the rules of engagement” will be in November.
In the meantime, operatives stress that down-ballot campaigns should prepare early and not rely on national organizations to fill the gaps on field work, particularly in House races outside the presidential battleground states. IMGE, a Republican digital firm, drafted a memo encouraging candidates to push early and absentee voting by having draft emails, social media posts and phone messages ready in advance of potential changes in election details, and to “go back to the drawing board” on get out the vote, investing in tutorials explaining new processes to voters.
“As a down-ballot race, you can’t control the movement of a nationwide vote-by-mail effort,” said Samantha Steelman, an organizing director for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign who is advising House campaigns to have those materials ready. “That’s why it’s critical for campaigns at all levels to start educating voters now on their voting options in their state and not wait for national groups.”
Mexican factory shutdown
Sweeping Mexican factory shutdown strains U.S. production of critical supplies
A range of U.S. companies — from N95 mask supplier 3M to defense contractors — say they’re affected by the factory shutdowns in Mexico.
By SABRINA RODRIGUEZ
American companies making crucial goods like ventilators, face masks and military equipment are unable to get parts and materials they need because the Mexican government has shuttered hundreds of factories and is refusing to reopen them during the pandemic.
Canada and the United States have deemed many manufacturers of parts and materials essential and kept them open during the coronavirus outbreak. But Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is only allowing companies to operate if they’re directly involved in critical industries such as health care, food production or energy — and not if they supply materials to companies involved in those industries. So Mexican firms along the supply chain that make everything from cleaning products to motors have shut down.
So far, López Obrador has refused to bow to entreaties from the Trump administration and U.S. manufacturers to change his mind, a move that could cost U.S. firms billions as they search for supplies elsewhere around the world and give new ammunition to trade hawks in the administration who want more domestic manufacturing.
“I’m doing all I can to save the U.S.-Mexico-Canada supply chains that were created over the last decades,” U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Christopher Landau wrote on Twitter last week. “It’s possible and essential to take care of the health of workers without destroying these chains. The economic integration of North America requires coordination.”
A range of U.S. companies — from N95 mask supplier 3M to defense contractors — say they’re affected by the factory shutdowns in Mexico. Agriculture and food companies report struggling to get the equipment they need for production and distribution of goods. Ventilator makers are reporting trouble getting motors. Companies seeking cement for construction or generators for energy security say they’re also having difficulties.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said last week that he does not intend to make changes to Mexico’s policy until the U.S. economy starts to reopen. | Rebecca Blackwell/AP Photo
More than 320 U.S. manufacturers wrote to López Obrador last week asking him to declare businesses essential if they are producing materials key to the supply chain for critical industries, such as health care — like both the U.S. and Canada do. They asked him to reopen some of Mexico’s factories with strict safety standards that protect the health of workers. The U.S. State Department has also been in talks with the Mexican government to advocate on behalf of U.S. businesses, a State spokesperson told POLITICO.
Some of the inputs aren’t always visibly essential and critical, such as motors needed for ventilator production, said Sergio Gómez Lora, a representative of the CEO Business Council of Mexico in the U.S. office.
“It’s not only the medical equipment itself, but all the inputs you need," Gómez Lora said. "That part isn’t reflected in the Mexican measures.”
But Mexico, at first slow in responding to the pandemic, has now entered the peak period of coronavirus transmission, the Mexican government announced last week. And López Obrador said last week that he does not intend to make changes to Mexico’s policy until the U.S. economy starts to reopen.
“It’s still not the moment,” he said in a daily press conference on Thursday. “We’ve committed, above all to our national business owners, to analyze the opening [in the U.S.] to little by little start going back to normal productivity at the border. But this has not been decided yet because the coronavirus is unfortunately affecting them very much and we also have sanitary policies.”
Mexico currently has more than 14,500 confirmed coronavirus cases and more than 1,350 deaths.
U.S. businesses predict the disruptions could cost companies billions of dollars and create a long-term disruption in North American manufacturing interdependence that has grown since NAFTA went into effect in 1994. The shutdowns are coming just months before President Donald Trump’s new North American trade agreement, the USMCA, is scheduled to go into effect on July 1.
“These massive supply chain disruptions threaten to undermine the U.S.-Mexico relationship, which comes after Mexico became the U.S.’ biggest trading partner” in 2019, said Neil Herrington, senior vice president of the Americas for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
So far, some of the major impact has been felt in the medical and food industries, where cleaning and sanitizing supplies, as well as manufacturing and maintenance of equipment necessary for agricultural production, have not been considered essential in Mexico.
Even the Pentagon has taken notice of Mexico’s stricter approach on what it designates an essential activity. Last week, Ellen Lord, Defense undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, said the factory closures in Mexico were affecting Defense’s major prime contractors, which supply the U.S. defense firms, particularly aerospace manufacturing.
A spokesperson for the Mexican Embassy said Mexican Ambassador to the U.S. Martha Bárcena has been in touch with concerned U.S. business and industry groups and has transmitted the issue to the government.
Part of the issue stems from Mexico’s rapid shift in how it is responding to the pandemic. In just a month, López Obrador went from urging Mexicans to go about their lives as normal to strict lockdown measures in an effort to prevent hospitals from being overrun with infected patients.
“Mexico did a 180 on policy in a matter of days. It went from no response to a very drastic response with not a lot of defined policy in essential services,” said a U.S. business source closely following the issue.
Meanwhile, some Mexican states, such as Baja California and Sonora, have been more restrictive in their measures. Both of those states on the U.S.-Mexico border are home to thousands of maquiladoras, which have seen many cases of the coronavirus, the Los Angeles Times reported. Still, some of those foreign-owned factories have continued to operate in violation of federal orders.
U.S. and Mexican industry sources have also noted that Mexico's approach could make it harder for North America to respond to the crisis. Gómez Lora said Mexico’s approach could have repercussions that hurt its own response.
“At some point, certain essential activities will not be performed," he said, "and that will restrict the ability of the Mexican government to address the health care crisis.”
A range of U.S. companies — from N95 mask supplier 3M to defense contractors — say they’re affected by the factory shutdowns in Mexico.
By SABRINA RODRIGUEZ
American companies making crucial goods like ventilators, face masks and military equipment are unable to get parts and materials they need because the Mexican government has shuttered hundreds of factories and is refusing to reopen them during the pandemic.
Canada and the United States have deemed many manufacturers of parts and materials essential and kept them open during the coronavirus outbreak. But Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is only allowing companies to operate if they’re directly involved in critical industries such as health care, food production or energy — and not if they supply materials to companies involved in those industries. So Mexican firms along the supply chain that make everything from cleaning products to motors have shut down.
So far, López Obrador has refused to bow to entreaties from the Trump administration and U.S. manufacturers to change his mind, a move that could cost U.S. firms billions as they search for supplies elsewhere around the world and give new ammunition to trade hawks in the administration who want more domestic manufacturing.
“I’m doing all I can to save the U.S.-Mexico-Canada supply chains that were created over the last decades,” U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Christopher Landau wrote on Twitter last week. “It’s possible and essential to take care of the health of workers without destroying these chains. The economic integration of North America requires coordination.”
A range of U.S. companies — from N95 mask supplier 3M to defense contractors — say they’re affected by the factory shutdowns in Mexico. Agriculture and food companies report struggling to get the equipment they need for production and distribution of goods. Ventilator makers are reporting trouble getting motors. Companies seeking cement for construction or generators for energy security say they’re also having difficulties.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said last week that he does not intend to make changes to Mexico’s policy until the U.S. economy starts to reopen. | Rebecca Blackwell/AP Photo
More than 320 U.S. manufacturers wrote to López Obrador last week asking him to declare businesses essential if they are producing materials key to the supply chain for critical industries, such as health care — like both the U.S. and Canada do. They asked him to reopen some of Mexico’s factories with strict safety standards that protect the health of workers. The U.S. State Department has also been in talks with the Mexican government to advocate on behalf of U.S. businesses, a State spokesperson told POLITICO.
Some of the inputs aren’t always visibly essential and critical, such as motors needed for ventilator production, said Sergio Gómez Lora, a representative of the CEO Business Council of Mexico in the U.S. office.
“It’s not only the medical equipment itself, but all the inputs you need," Gómez Lora said. "That part isn’t reflected in the Mexican measures.”
But Mexico, at first slow in responding to the pandemic, has now entered the peak period of coronavirus transmission, the Mexican government announced last week. And López Obrador said last week that he does not intend to make changes to Mexico’s policy until the U.S. economy starts to reopen.
“It’s still not the moment,” he said in a daily press conference on Thursday. “We’ve committed, above all to our national business owners, to analyze the opening [in the U.S.] to little by little start going back to normal productivity at the border. But this has not been decided yet because the coronavirus is unfortunately affecting them very much and we also have sanitary policies.”
Mexico currently has more than 14,500 confirmed coronavirus cases and more than 1,350 deaths.
U.S. businesses predict the disruptions could cost companies billions of dollars and create a long-term disruption in North American manufacturing interdependence that has grown since NAFTA went into effect in 1994. The shutdowns are coming just months before President Donald Trump’s new North American trade agreement, the USMCA, is scheduled to go into effect on July 1.
“These massive supply chain disruptions threaten to undermine the U.S.-Mexico relationship, which comes after Mexico became the U.S.’ biggest trading partner” in 2019, said Neil Herrington, senior vice president of the Americas for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
So far, some of the major impact has been felt in the medical and food industries, where cleaning and sanitizing supplies, as well as manufacturing and maintenance of equipment necessary for agricultural production, have not been considered essential in Mexico.
Even the Pentagon has taken notice of Mexico’s stricter approach on what it designates an essential activity. Last week, Ellen Lord, Defense undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, said the factory closures in Mexico were affecting Defense’s major prime contractors, which supply the U.S. defense firms, particularly aerospace manufacturing.
A spokesperson for the Mexican Embassy said Mexican Ambassador to the U.S. Martha Bárcena has been in touch with concerned U.S. business and industry groups and has transmitted the issue to the government.
Part of the issue stems from Mexico’s rapid shift in how it is responding to the pandemic. In just a month, López Obrador went from urging Mexicans to go about their lives as normal to strict lockdown measures in an effort to prevent hospitals from being overrun with infected patients.
“Mexico did a 180 on policy in a matter of days. It went from no response to a very drastic response with not a lot of defined policy in essential services,” said a U.S. business source closely following the issue.
Meanwhile, some Mexican states, such as Baja California and Sonora, have been more restrictive in their measures. Both of those states on the U.S.-Mexico border are home to thousands of maquiladoras, which have seen many cases of the coronavirus, the Los Angeles Times reported. Still, some of those foreign-owned factories have continued to operate in violation of federal orders.
U.S. and Mexican industry sources have also noted that Mexico's approach could make it harder for North America to respond to the crisis. Gómez Lora said Mexico’s approach could have repercussions that hurt its own response.
“At some point, certain essential activities will not be performed," he said, "and that will restrict the ability of the Mexican government to address the health care crisis.”
Bleach boy...
Trump campaign lashes out over 'Don't defend Trump' memo
A strategy memo on coronavirus distributed by the National Republican Senatorial Committee infuriated Trump aides.
By ALEX ISENSTADT
Earlier this month, the Senate Republican campaign arm circulated a memo with shocking advice to GOP candidates on responding to coronavirus: “Don’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban — attack China.”
The Trump campaign was furious.
On Monday — just days after POLITICO first reported the existence of the memo — Trump political adviser Justin Clark told NRSC executive director Kevin McLaughlin that any Republican candidate who followed the memo’s advice shouldn’t expect the active support of the reelection campaign and risked losing the support of Republican voters.
McLaughlin responded by saying he agreed with the Trump campaign’s position and, according to two people familiar with the conversation, clarified that the committee wasn’t advising candidates to not defend Trump over his response.
The episode illustrates how the Trump political apparatus demands — and receives — fealty from fellow Republicans and moves aggressively to tamp down on any perceived dissent within the GOP. The president maintains an iron grip on his party, even as his poll numbers sag and he confronts fierce criticism from Democrats over his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
During the conversation, McLaughlin called the line in the memo inartful in its wording and argued that the overall thrust of the document was about pushing candidates to go on offense over China — something that Trump has done frequently in recent days — and not to evade defending the president.
“There is no daylight between the NRSC and President Trump,” McLaughlin said in a statement, adding: “Senate Republicans have worked hand in glove with the Trump administration to ensure a highly effective federal response to Covid-19.”
The 57-page memo, which was authored by a top GOP strategist, was perceived by Trump aides as giving candidates leeway to avoid backing the president on what could be the defining issue of the 2020 campaign. And they held a series of conversations on Friday and over the weekend figuring out how to respond.
The memo urged GOP Senate candidates to stay relentlessly on message with attacks against China, where the coronavirus originated, when pressed about the pandemic on the campaign trail. When asked about Trump’s response to the pandemic, the document advised candidates to pivot to an attack on the authoritarian country rather than offer an explicit defense of Trump’s response.
But the Trump team didn’t take kindly to the guidance. Senior Trump campaign officials, including campaign manager Brad Parscale, political advisers Clark, Bill Stepien and Chris Carr, and communications director Tim Murtaugh, decided to reach out to the NRSC to convey the campaign’s displeasure. Top Republican National Committee officials were also involved in the deliberations and the White House was kept apprised of developments.
Clark said in a statement that Republican candidates “who want to win will be running with the president.”
“Candidates will listen to the bad advice in this memo at their own peril,” he added. “President Trump enjoys unprecedented support among Republican voters and everyone on the ballot in November will want to tap into that enthusiasm. The president’s campaign, the RNC, and the NRSC are firmly on the same page here.”
Trump campaign officials said they were rankled by other passages in the memo, including one line that advised Republican candidates to say: “I wish that everyone acted earlier - that includes our elected officials, the World Health Organization, and the CDC.”
The memo was distributed by the Senate GOP campaign arm, though it was not explicitly drafted by or for the committee. It was authored by the political consulting firm of Brett O’Donnell, a veteran GOP strategist who advises Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton.
The document details how China mishandled the viral outbreak and offers candidates detailed talking points for going after the authoritarian country. It also provides guidance on how to respond to accusations that targeting China is inciting racism.
O’Donnell vehemently denied that he was urging Republican candidates to distance themselves from the White House.
“I never advise candidates not to defend the president, and the media shouldn’t take one line out of context,” O’Donnell said in a statement. “I have spent the last four years of my life being an advocate for the president and advising people to do the same.”
He added: “This document explained how to remain on offense by staying focused on the president’s China travel ban — which Democrats like Joe Biden opposed. Candidates, and all Americans, should blame the Chinese Communist Party for spreading this virus and support President Trump’s work to hold them accountable.”
A strategy memo on coronavirus distributed by the National Republican Senatorial Committee infuriated Trump aides.
By ALEX ISENSTADT
Earlier this month, the Senate Republican campaign arm circulated a memo with shocking advice to GOP candidates on responding to coronavirus: “Don’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban — attack China.”
The Trump campaign was furious.
On Monday — just days after POLITICO first reported the existence of the memo — Trump political adviser Justin Clark told NRSC executive director Kevin McLaughlin that any Republican candidate who followed the memo’s advice shouldn’t expect the active support of the reelection campaign and risked losing the support of Republican voters.
McLaughlin responded by saying he agreed with the Trump campaign’s position and, according to two people familiar with the conversation, clarified that the committee wasn’t advising candidates to not defend Trump over his response.
The episode illustrates how the Trump political apparatus demands — and receives — fealty from fellow Republicans and moves aggressively to tamp down on any perceived dissent within the GOP. The president maintains an iron grip on his party, even as his poll numbers sag and he confronts fierce criticism from Democrats over his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
During the conversation, McLaughlin called the line in the memo inartful in its wording and argued that the overall thrust of the document was about pushing candidates to go on offense over China — something that Trump has done frequently in recent days — and not to evade defending the president.
“There is no daylight between the NRSC and President Trump,” McLaughlin said in a statement, adding: “Senate Republicans have worked hand in glove with the Trump administration to ensure a highly effective federal response to Covid-19.”
The 57-page memo, which was authored by a top GOP strategist, was perceived by Trump aides as giving candidates leeway to avoid backing the president on what could be the defining issue of the 2020 campaign. And they held a series of conversations on Friday and over the weekend figuring out how to respond.
The memo urged GOP Senate candidates to stay relentlessly on message with attacks against China, where the coronavirus originated, when pressed about the pandemic on the campaign trail. When asked about Trump’s response to the pandemic, the document advised candidates to pivot to an attack on the authoritarian country rather than offer an explicit defense of Trump’s response.
But the Trump team didn’t take kindly to the guidance. Senior Trump campaign officials, including campaign manager Brad Parscale, political advisers Clark, Bill Stepien and Chris Carr, and communications director Tim Murtaugh, decided to reach out to the NRSC to convey the campaign’s displeasure. Top Republican National Committee officials were also involved in the deliberations and the White House was kept apprised of developments.
Clark said in a statement that Republican candidates “who want to win will be running with the president.”
“Candidates will listen to the bad advice in this memo at their own peril,” he added. “President Trump enjoys unprecedented support among Republican voters and everyone on the ballot in November will want to tap into that enthusiasm. The president’s campaign, the RNC, and the NRSC are firmly on the same page here.”
Trump campaign officials said they were rankled by other passages in the memo, including one line that advised Republican candidates to say: “I wish that everyone acted earlier - that includes our elected officials, the World Health Organization, and the CDC.”
The memo was distributed by the Senate GOP campaign arm, though it was not explicitly drafted by or for the committee. It was authored by the political consulting firm of Brett O’Donnell, a veteran GOP strategist who advises Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton.
The document details how China mishandled the viral outbreak and offers candidates detailed talking points for going after the authoritarian country. It also provides guidance on how to respond to accusations that targeting China is inciting racism.
O’Donnell vehemently denied that he was urging Republican candidates to distance themselves from the White House.
“I never advise candidates not to defend the president, and the media shouldn’t take one line out of context,” O’Donnell said in a statement. “I have spent the last four years of my life being an advocate for the president and advising people to do the same.”
He added: “This document explained how to remain on offense by staying focused on the president’s China travel ban — which Democrats like Joe Biden opposed. Candidates, and all Americans, should blame the Chinese Communist Party for spreading this virus and support President Trump’s work to hold them accountable.”
April 27, 2020
Working from Home
Well I have work to do so I will not post today, but believe me when I say the stupid shit is still happening..
April 24, 2020
Administration ducks and dodges
Trump administration ducks and dodges to justify wall spending
In court and in the press, government officials have refused to detail the legal underpinnings of billions of dollars in transfers.
By DAVID ROGERS
All but forgotten amid the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump’s border wall is now a story of two walls at once.
One is the giant, steel barrier in the Southwest, powered by a steady stream of contract awards, including four worth over $900 million in April alone during the lockdown.
The second is back in Washington, where the Defense Department continues to withhold information as to how precisely it diverted $3.6 billion in military construction appropriations to help speed this work.
This secrecy is a great riddle, given how open the administration once was in claiming its authority to toss aside laws under the president’s emergency powers. Trump’s actions have since posed a fundamental challenge to Congress’ power of the purse under the Constitution and the balance between the branches of government as envisioned by the Founding Fathers. So why withhold a full explanation after the deed?
“What’s clear is they are not being transparent,” said Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, a West Point graduate and the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Common sense says … if they say they can’t talk about it, then there’s something they don’t want to talk about, i.e., it’s not appropriate.”
Indeed, federal judges are being told so little in court proceedings that it’s hard for them to “follow the money.”
Appearing before the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals last month, the Justice Department portrayed a seamless budget process in which the entire $3.6 billion was diverted without a single transfer or reprogramming of funds. Defense Secretary Mark Esper simply “reprioritized” the use of the military funds already available to him, said H. Thomas Byron III, a Justice Department appellate attorney.
“Can I stop you there? You said 'reprioritize?’” asked Judge Daniel Collins, a member of the panel hearing oral arguments on the legality of the wall funding. “I want to understand as best I can … what actually happens. Is there a transfer and a reprogramming of money from one account to another account and then an expenditure differently? How does the money move in this case?”
“No your honor, there’s not a transfer or a reprogramming of any kind,” answered Byron.
Since few in the courtroom seemed familiar with the nitty-gritty of the appropriations process in Congress, no one challenged this account. Minutes later Collins, who was appointed to the appeals court by Trump, turned around and used the Justice Department’s own words to squelch arguments made by one of the attorneys opposing the wall funding.
In fact, the process was far more complicated than what was portrayed during the hearing.
For one, Congress does not appropriate military construction funds in one lump sum to the Defense Department. Instead, the dollars go to separate construction accounts for individual services: the Army, Air Force and Navy, which also supports the Marines.
Over the years, lawmakers have severely limited the Defense secretary’s ability to transfer these dollars from one service to another. So DOD’s acting comptroller, Elaine McCusker, had to find a path whereby all these disparate appropriations could be funneled to one entity and the lead player on the wall project: the Army Corps of Engineers.
To minimize the political backlash in Congress, DOD opted to go first with a $1.84 billion tranche representing prior appropriations for overseas projects. But that also posed challenges because of the unique bill language attached to a big part of this funding.
This has received no attention in the courts, but $786 million, or more than 40 percent of the dollars in the first tranche, constituted Overseas Contingency Operations appropriations — money outside the annual base budget for military construction.
This is important because when allocating OCO dollars, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees are more specific in their bill language. Thus, the enacted law dictated not only which service got the OCO dollars but spelled out that the purpose of the funding was to build projects “outside of the United States.”
The odyssey of two Navy projects in Spain and Italy, totaling about $87.6 million, illustrates the scope of what was entailed in moving this money to the Corps.
For fiscal 2019, both were part of a larger package of OCO appropriations for the Navy designated for projects “outside the United States.” But now, based on DOD’s own answers, the same dollars for Navy port and air operations are being “made available” by the Navy directly to the Army Corps of Engineers to build a wall inside the U.S.
For the Navy to go through the Army Corps of Engineers for any construction project is an anomaly in itself, since the department has its own long-standing Naval Facilities Engineering Command.
During the 9th Circuit heading in San Francisco, Judge Collins had asked, “How does the money move in this case?” If this fuller account sounds more complicated than what Collins was told, that’s because it is.
Getting answers from DOD and the Comptroller’s office is no easy matter. Over the past two weeks, written questions submitted by POLITICO were repeatedly ducked, despite efforts by press staffers to seek more clarity.
The department is clearest in denying any transfers have been part of the process, asserting that the funds “made available” to the Corps came “directly from the Components [individual services’] military construction accounts.” That would indicate the appropriations for the overseas projects were apportioned from the Treasury to each service as prescribed by Congress, and then orders were given to apply the funds instead to the wall.
How this change of direction was accomplished is the crux of the matter, but here DOD clams up.
One scenario is that the Comptroller’s office used its authority under the so-called 460 military construction review process to “withhold” funds for the deferred overseas projects. That would have left each service with a surplus of undesignated funds, which could be “made available” to the Corps’ for wall construction contracts without needing transfers.
But thus far, DOD won't say whether this was the path it took. Instead, in response to specific questions, it has twice handed back official statements that avoid any mention of withhold orders or the 460 process in connection with the first tranche of funds.
These responses are telling, given how firm DOD is in denying any transfers between service accounts. In the same statements, DOD does say that the second tranche of $1.76 billion — including projects in 23 states and three U.S. territories — is “currently on withhold (funds withheld from obligations) from the Components [services] and has not been made available to the Secretary of the Army, as the funds are not currently needed for obligation."
Part of DOD’s refusal to answer directly may go to the fact that any large-scale use of prolonged withhold orders invites challenges under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
The ICA recognizes the need for executive departments to temporarily withhold funds in managing programs. But after Congress’ historic battles with President Richard Nixon over impoundment — he refused to spend appropriations for a variety of programs — these are strictly circumscribed.
The most routine withholds are programmatic, such as the Forest Service holding off on committing firefighting appropriations until the annual fire season. Or, in the case of a new program created by Congress, a department might withhold spending funds until rules and regulations are in place to administer the program.
Similarly, if the DOD wanted to rescind or defer funding for one of the military projects, it could withhold obligating the funds on a short-term basis. Such withholds figured in a famous battle between former Vice President Dick Cheney, when he was Defense secretary, and then-Sen. Bennett Johnston (D-La.) over funding for an Army munitions facility in Louisiana. By coming up with various rescission requests or deferrals, DOD was able to use withholds over an extended period against Johnston.
But past DOD comptrollers who served under Republican and Democratic presidents said in interviews they have never witnessed withholds on the scale of what appears to be happening in the case of wall funds.
Budget experts say that when evaluating the legality of a withhold order it is most important to look at the purpose — and how it corresponds with the purpose of the initial appropriation enacted by Congress.
Mindful of this, the administration is telling the courts that the border wall qualifies as a military construction project under a 1982 provision giving DOD leeway to construct unauthorized projects in the event of war or a presidential emergency declaration like Trump’s last year.
Known as Section 2808, this grant of special authority is not without conditions: The emergency has to be one that “requires use of the armed forces,” and the project must be one that supports “such use of the armed forces.” Since military construction is typically defined as work “carried out with respect to a military installation,” the definition of what constitutes a “military installation” also comes into play.
Here the administration argues that once a parcel of land has been acquired by the Corps for the wall and moved onto the Army’s property books, it thereby qualifies as a “military installation” since the land is “under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of a military department.” That’s why Fort Bliss in Texas now seems to be stretching into three more states — New Mexico, Arizona and California — under this process.
Opponents cry foul, but the administration insists it has checked all the boxes and can rightly claim to be spending its military appropriations for the same broad purpose as Congress intended — that is, “military construction.”
But this is where the OCO restrictions could come into play in the courts. If Congress appropriates money for projects “outside the United States," how can that be for the same purpose as a wall inside the U.S?
“They are using this emergency power to say, `We can do anything we want,’” said Reed, who early on asked the Government Accountability Office to review the bidding procedures used by the Corps to speed contracts for the wall. “There’s no threat of the Mexican Army coming across the border. If that were the case, we’d be building bunkers, tank traps … This was a political, campaign promise [Trump] made and he’s got to deliver on it.”
"And he’s just saying, 'Don’t bother with details or legal rules and regulations. Just build.’”
In court and in the press, government officials have refused to detail the legal underpinnings of billions of dollars in transfers.
By DAVID ROGERS
All but forgotten amid the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump’s border wall is now a story of two walls at once.
One is the giant, steel barrier in the Southwest, powered by a steady stream of contract awards, including four worth over $900 million in April alone during the lockdown.
The second is back in Washington, where the Defense Department continues to withhold information as to how precisely it diverted $3.6 billion in military construction appropriations to help speed this work.
This secrecy is a great riddle, given how open the administration once was in claiming its authority to toss aside laws under the president’s emergency powers. Trump’s actions have since posed a fundamental challenge to Congress’ power of the purse under the Constitution and the balance between the branches of government as envisioned by the Founding Fathers. So why withhold a full explanation after the deed?
“What’s clear is they are not being transparent,” said Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, a West Point graduate and the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Common sense says … if they say they can’t talk about it, then there’s something they don’t want to talk about, i.e., it’s not appropriate.”
Indeed, federal judges are being told so little in court proceedings that it’s hard for them to “follow the money.”
Appearing before the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals last month, the Justice Department portrayed a seamless budget process in which the entire $3.6 billion was diverted without a single transfer or reprogramming of funds. Defense Secretary Mark Esper simply “reprioritized” the use of the military funds already available to him, said H. Thomas Byron III, a Justice Department appellate attorney.
“Can I stop you there? You said 'reprioritize?’” asked Judge Daniel Collins, a member of the panel hearing oral arguments on the legality of the wall funding. “I want to understand as best I can … what actually happens. Is there a transfer and a reprogramming of money from one account to another account and then an expenditure differently? How does the money move in this case?”
“No your honor, there’s not a transfer or a reprogramming of any kind,” answered Byron.
Since few in the courtroom seemed familiar with the nitty-gritty of the appropriations process in Congress, no one challenged this account. Minutes later Collins, who was appointed to the appeals court by Trump, turned around and used the Justice Department’s own words to squelch arguments made by one of the attorneys opposing the wall funding.
In fact, the process was far more complicated than what was portrayed during the hearing.
For one, Congress does not appropriate military construction funds in one lump sum to the Defense Department. Instead, the dollars go to separate construction accounts for individual services: the Army, Air Force and Navy, which also supports the Marines.
Over the years, lawmakers have severely limited the Defense secretary’s ability to transfer these dollars from one service to another. So DOD’s acting comptroller, Elaine McCusker, had to find a path whereby all these disparate appropriations could be funneled to one entity and the lead player on the wall project: the Army Corps of Engineers.
To minimize the political backlash in Congress, DOD opted to go first with a $1.84 billion tranche representing prior appropriations for overseas projects. But that also posed challenges because of the unique bill language attached to a big part of this funding.
This has received no attention in the courts, but $786 million, or more than 40 percent of the dollars in the first tranche, constituted Overseas Contingency Operations appropriations — money outside the annual base budget for military construction.
This is important because when allocating OCO dollars, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees are more specific in their bill language. Thus, the enacted law dictated not only which service got the OCO dollars but spelled out that the purpose of the funding was to build projects “outside of the United States.”
The odyssey of two Navy projects in Spain and Italy, totaling about $87.6 million, illustrates the scope of what was entailed in moving this money to the Corps.
For fiscal 2019, both were part of a larger package of OCO appropriations for the Navy designated for projects “outside the United States.” But now, based on DOD’s own answers, the same dollars for Navy port and air operations are being “made available” by the Navy directly to the Army Corps of Engineers to build a wall inside the U.S.
For the Navy to go through the Army Corps of Engineers for any construction project is an anomaly in itself, since the department has its own long-standing Naval Facilities Engineering Command.
During the 9th Circuit heading in San Francisco, Judge Collins had asked, “How does the money move in this case?” If this fuller account sounds more complicated than what Collins was told, that’s because it is.
Getting answers from DOD and the Comptroller’s office is no easy matter. Over the past two weeks, written questions submitted by POLITICO were repeatedly ducked, despite efforts by press staffers to seek more clarity.
The department is clearest in denying any transfers have been part of the process, asserting that the funds “made available” to the Corps came “directly from the Components [individual services’] military construction accounts.” That would indicate the appropriations for the overseas projects were apportioned from the Treasury to each service as prescribed by Congress, and then orders were given to apply the funds instead to the wall.
How this change of direction was accomplished is the crux of the matter, but here DOD clams up.
One scenario is that the Comptroller’s office used its authority under the so-called 460 military construction review process to “withhold” funds for the deferred overseas projects. That would have left each service with a surplus of undesignated funds, which could be “made available” to the Corps’ for wall construction contracts without needing transfers.
But thus far, DOD won't say whether this was the path it took. Instead, in response to specific questions, it has twice handed back official statements that avoid any mention of withhold orders or the 460 process in connection with the first tranche of funds.
These responses are telling, given how firm DOD is in denying any transfers between service accounts. In the same statements, DOD does say that the second tranche of $1.76 billion — including projects in 23 states and three U.S. territories — is “currently on withhold (funds withheld from obligations) from the Components [services] and has not been made available to the Secretary of the Army, as the funds are not currently needed for obligation."
Part of DOD’s refusal to answer directly may go to the fact that any large-scale use of prolonged withhold orders invites challenges under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
The ICA recognizes the need for executive departments to temporarily withhold funds in managing programs. But after Congress’ historic battles with President Richard Nixon over impoundment — he refused to spend appropriations for a variety of programs — these are strictly circumscribed.
The most routine withholds are programmatic, such as the Forest Service holding off on committing firefighting appropriations until the annual fire season. Or, in the case of a new program created by Congress, a department might withhold spending funds until rules and regulations are in place to administer the program.
Similarly, if the DOD wanted to rescind or defer funding for one of the military projects, it could withhold obligating the funds on a short-term basis. Such withholds figured in a famous battle between former Vice President Dick Cheney, when he was Defense secretary, and then-Sen. Bennett Johnston (D-La.) over funding for an Army munitions facility in Louisiana. By coming up with various rescission requests or deferrals, DOD was able to use withholds over an extended period against Johnston.
But past DOD comptrollers who served under Republican and Democratic presidents said in interviews they have never witnessed withholds on the scale of what appears to be happening in the case of wall funds.
Budget experts say that when evaluating the legality of a withhold order it is most important to look at the purpose — and how it corresponds with the purpose of the initial appropriation enacted by Congress.
Mindful of this, the administration is telling the courts that the border wall qualifies as a military construction project under a 1982 provision giving DOD leeway to construct unauthorized projects in the event of war or a presidential emergency declaration like Trump’s last year.
Known as Section 2808, this grant of special authority is not without conditions: The emergency has to be one that “requires use of the armed forces,” and the project must be one that supports “such use of the armed forces.” Since military construction is typically defined as work “carried out with respect to a military installation,” the definition of what constitutes a “military installation” also comes into play.
Here the administration argues that once a parcel of land has been acquired by the Corps for the wall and moved onto the Army’s property books, it thereby qualifies as a “military installation” since the land is “under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of a military department.” That’s why Fort Bliss in Texas now seems to be stretching into three more states — New Mexico, Arizona and California — under this process.
Opponents cry foul, but the administration insists it has checked all the boxes and can rightly claim to be spending its military appropriations for the same broad purpose as Congress intended — that is, “military construction.”
But this is where the OCO restrictions could come into play in the courts. If Congress appropriates money for projects “outside the United States," how can that be for the same purpose as a wall inside the U.S?
“They are using this emergency power to say, `We can do anything we want,’” said Reed, who early on asked the Government Accountability Office to review the bidding procedures used by the Corps to speed contracts for the wall. “There’s no threat of the Mexican Army coming across the border. If that were the case, we’d be building bunkers, tank traps … This was a political, campaign promise [Trump] made and he’s got to deliver on it.”
"And he’s just saying, 'Don’t bother with details or legal rules and regulations. Just build.’”
Let Orangutan do it first...
Trump: Maybe We Can Inject Disinfectant to Cure COVID-19
KEVIN DRUM
A few hours ago President Trump took to the airwaves to blather about using heat and light “through the skin” to cure COVID-19. Or maybe we should all be injecting bleach to perform “almost a cleaning.” Or something. Just so you can be sure I’m not making this up.
This is not just idiotic, even by Trump’s standards, but potentially dangerous since someone watching will probably decide to guzzle a cup of Clorox because they’ve got a fever. But here’s my real question. I just checked the front pages of four big newspapers and not one of them covered this. Why? How are people supposed to know what kind of moron we have in the Oval Office unless the press covers it? Do we literally just not care anymore?
KEVIN DRUM
A few hours ago President Trump took to the airwaves to blather about using heat and light “through the skin” to cure COVID-19. Or maybe we should all be injecting bleach to perform “almost a cleaning.” Or something. Just so you can be sure I’m not making this up.
This is not just idiotic, even by Trump’s standards, but potentially dangerous since someone watching will probably decide to guzzle a cup of Clorox because they’ve got a fever. But here’s my real question. I just checked the front pages of four big newspapers and not one of them covered this. Why? How are people supposed to know what kind of moron we have in the Oval Office unless the press covers it? Do we literally just not care anymore?
Just Screwed
“You’re Just Screwed”: Why Black-Owned Businesses Are Struggling to Get Coronavirus Relief Loans
An ugly history of inequality is compounding the economic crisis.
KARA VOGHT
K.B. Brown hasn’t opened the doors of his North Minneapolis print shop since March 27, the day Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz issued stay-at-home orders that forced non-essential businesses to close. A few thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise is sitting in his shuttered storefront, and he won’t be paid for most of it until customers can safely retrieve it. To keep some money coming in, Brown’s wife took a job at the local Amazon warehouse sorting packages four days a week, working double shifts on two of those days.
“We’re…scared,” Brown tells me. He chooses the word slowly and deliberately before releasing a nervous laugh. Brown and his wife started the business, Wolfpack Promotionals, in 2014. After limping along for a few years, they earned $200,000 in revenue in 2019, their best year yet. “We were looking at 2020 as a very big year for us,” he says. “At this point, I want a redo.”
Like other small business owners, Brown hoped to take advantage of provisions in the CARES Act, the $2 trillion pandemic relief package Congress passed last month. He asked Wells Fargo—a banking behemoth he’s done business with for years—about applying for a Small Business Administration disaster loan or the Paycheck Protection Program, a pot of money meant to help small businesses cover payroll and other expenses during the coronavirus crisis. (Money for both types of loans comes from the SBA, but the government relies on commercial banks and other lenders to process the PPP loans.)
Brown says Wells Fargo provided no helpful details, and he hasn’t applied for the financing. “For a lot of the SBA stuff and other loans, you have to be ‘bankable,’” Brown tells me. “So if you couldn’t get a loan from the bank before, you’re just screwed. And many of us are in that position.”
By “us,” Brown is referring to fellow Twin Cities entrepreneurs who, like Brown, are black. Many have less-than-stellar credit, a side effect of the lengths they had to go to in order to start their businesses. Technically, the PPP doesn’t require a minimum credit score, but some potential borrowers aren’t convinced the program will live up to that promise. The distrust is no surprise: Discriminatory government policies, dating back to Reconstruction, have made connecting black business owners with financing a daunting task.
“The system has never served them and has been the cause of a lot of harm,” says Felicia Perry, the executive director of the West Broadway Business and Area Coalition, a group that supports businesses in Brown’s neighborhood. “There’s a real trust gap there.”
In a statement, Wells Fargo said it is “working as quickly as possible to assist small business customers with the Paycheck Protection Program…in compliance with the regulations and guidance provided by US Treasury and the SBA.”
When the pandemic took hold in the United States, lawmakers rushed to protect entrepreneurs in a manner that was swift, bipartisan, and—on its face—equitable. “All loan terms will be the same for everyone,” declares the Treasury Department’s PPP fact sheet. But we now know that those equal “terms” did not translate into equal access to the federal funds. Banks screened out businesses that they hadn’t previously lent money to and reportedly gave preferential treatment to wealthier clients.
After just two weeks, the PPP fund ran out of money altogether. On Tuesday, congressional leaders announced a $310 billion deal to replenish it. But the additional money may not be enough to rescue people like Brown. Black business owners headed into the pandemic with smaller savings accounts, more debt, and less access to banks and capital than their white counterparts. The results could be catastrophic. “If you focus just on this moment, you miss the big picture,” says Mehrsa Baradaran, a wealth inequality expert and law professor at the University of California, Irvine. “You have to understand the history of how we got here.”
Walz’s formal decree late last month didn’t actually make much of a difference in Brown’s finances: In March 2019, Wolfpack had pulled in $18,000 dollars in revenue. This March, as fear spread and the economy ground to a halt, it took in just $2,500. When Brown officially closed his shop following the governor’s order, he divvied up the company’s 2020 profits among himself and his four employees, all of whom are now collecting unemployment. The Phillips Family Foundation, a Minnesota non-profit run by the family of Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), has placed a few preorders for when business resumes. “It’s not plugging the hole, but it’s slowing down the leak,” Brown says.
Brown’s current circumstances are all the more heartbreaking when you learn what he went through to open his shop—which is to say, in his words, “hell.” In April 2014, he says, he consulted a financial adviser to secure seed money for $40,000 in printing and embroidery equipment. In the end, he only got $25,000—and the adviser charged a $15,000 fee. A lawyer helped them reverse that payment, but Brown’s wife’s credit score plummeted as the couple struggled to pay the manufacturer. To raise funds, Brown and his wife took out a loan against their home equity; eventually they were threatened with foreclosure. Brown’s wife tapped her state employee retirement account to pay off the debt, but the owner of the loan claims the Browns still owe roughly $2,000 in taxes and fees. These days, Brown ignores their calls—as well as those from his cable provider and his credit card issuer, all clamoring for overdue bills.
The obstacles Brown faced are common among African American entrepreneurs. They tend to rely heavily on their own personal finances to start businesses, despite the fact that the median black household has just one-tenth the wealth that the median white household has. These circumstances make it unlikely that would-be black business owners have liquid capital to spare—or know others who do. “In the case of most African American nascent small businesses owners, there isn’t going to be a ‘friends and family’ round of financing,” says Rachel Atkins, an assistant professor at New York University who studies racial disparities in entrepreneurship. “They don’t have those resources in their personal networks.”
That makes bank loans even more important for black-owned businesses to get off the ground, though their prospects of actually getting the money they need are dim. A 2017 study from the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Cleveland found that black businesses owners apply for funds at a 10 percent higher rate than white-owned firms, but their approval rates are nearly 20 percent lower. When black entrepreneurs do get approved for financing, only 40 percent receive the full amount they requested, compared to 70 percent of white business owners. Forty percent of black business owners surveyed are so pessimistic about their chances of being approved for bank loans that they don’t even bother to apply.
A recent study by the New York Fed classified nearly three-quarters of white-owned firms as “healthy” or “stable,” while only 43 percent of black-owned businesses earned those ratings. “From the moment W.E.B. DuBois started collecting data through today, most black businesses are tiny—‘pebbles on the shore of business enterprise,’ he called them,” UC Irvine’s Baradaran explains. “They’re undercapitalized and highly vulnerable to any dip or sway in the economy.”
These factors are now conspiring against black businesses as they struggle to obtain PPP loans. Black-owned firms often rely on community-development financial institutions—lenders focused on underserved populations—many of which still lacked access to the SBA system as of last week. In recent years, large banks have closed more branches in majority-black communities than elsewhere, an exodus that’s stymied the flow of credit into local small businesses. And because banks receive bigger fees for bigger loans, they’re incentivized to prioritize the applications of larger firms. “It makes total sense that black-owned firms would end up at the bottom of the list,” NYU’s Atkins says. “We’re now witnessing the layering effect of these decisions in the midst of a crisis.”
Perry says those dynamics are already playing out in the majority-black North Minneapolis neighborhood, where she spends much of her time reaching out to businesses to explain the SBA loans’ eligibility criteria. Some business owners she speaks to tell her they haven’t looked at the applications yet. There’s a variety of reasons: Some are dealing with the acute trauma of loved ones dying from the disease. Some don’t feel like they have the information they need to submit an application. Others feel too discouraged by past financing failures to try. She doesn’t know of any that have successfully received federal funding.
The structure of the loans is also an issue. Though a PPP loan can be forgiven if it’s used to cover payroll, rent, and utility costs, it’s likely that only 25 percent of it can be used for non-payroll expenses. Most black-owned firms are like Brown’s—they have just a handful of employees, making them eligible for a much smaller slice of the pie.
Any part of a PPP loan that isn’t forgiven must be paid back within two years, which could pose a hardship for entrepreneurs like Brown who are dealing with other forms of debt. And the terms of debt relief offered to black Americans have historically put them at a disadvantage. Amanda Fischer, the policy director for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, cites the Home Affordable Modification Program, a federal initiative to help struggling homeowners avoid foreclosure during the Great Recession. “There were studies showing that black and brown borrowers were less likely to get loan modifications, and when they got loan modifications, the terms were more punitive than white borrowers,” Fischer explains. “I’m thinking about businesses working ad hoc with debt collectors and landlords to work out deals to bridge the gap. There’s probably going to be discrimination that plays out that way, too.”
The disparity is grounded in a legacy of discriminatory policy. Baradaran points to the systematic exclusion of blacks from government-backed programs—such as the GI Bill and Federal Housing Administration loans—that allowed white families to build wealth over the course of the 20th century but left black families further behind. And she compares the potential for an extinction-level event among black businesses to the higher COVID-19 death rates among black Americans—a result of segregation, economic inequality, and environmental injustice.
“Coronavirus is clearly not racist: It’s a big, dumb virus that we’re all susceptible to,” she explains. “But any colorblind policy, whether one that deals with public health or access to credit, is going to be unfair to black communities”—because colorblind policies fail to account for the impact of racial inequality.
Right now, colorblind policy is the only policy Congress has. Democrats had initially demanded $125 billion be set aside for small and mid-size banks, in hopes of reaching more vulnerable entrepreneurs. They also called for “improvements to ensure all eligible small businesses can access this critical funding and are not turned away by banks.” The final package earmarked just $60 billion for smaller lenders, and no such improvements were included.
So what else can be done? Bharat Ramamurti—a former staffer for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) who serves on the congressional panel overseeing coronavirus relief funds—recommends paying banks a flat fee for each transaction and connecting them with applicants via independent clearinghouses, in order to prevent smaller, less-connected firms from getting shut out.
Fischer wants to see aggressive oversight of the lending and a moratorium on debt collection. In a paper published this month, she also advocates for the elimination of the rules governing how the PPP funds can be used. She warns that if the loans that do reach smaller firms end up being too modest to help them retain their employees, those businesses could be stuck with debts they can’t pay back. The end result, she predicts, will be that a widening wealth gap as industries shrink and consolidate around a few key players.
Brown worries this is already happening in his Minneapolis neighborhood. “The African American population has little or nothing when it comes to commercial stores, businesses, housing—you know, in terms of ownership,” he says, and the coronavirus crisis is only making things worse. “The existing population is losing ground.”
For now, Brown is making masks out of discarded T-shirt samples and donating them to the Hennepin County Medical Center, local police officers, and some elderly neighbors. He volunteers with his local business association to distribute hand sanitizer to the few intrepid business owners whose doors remain open. He doesn’t have a lot of faith that the government will do much to help him.
“Until those senators and representatives are put in the same boat as the population they’re supposed to be representing, we’ll never get anywhere,” Brown says. “They have to struggle like we are struggling before they can actually understand.”
An ugly history of inequality is compounding the economic crisis.
KARA VOGHT
K.B. Brown hasn’t opened the doors of his North Minneapolis print shop since March 27, the day Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz issued stay-at-home orders that forced non-essential businesses to close. A few thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise is sitting in his shuttered storefront, and he won’t be paid for most of it until customers can safely retrieve it. To keep some money coming in, Brown’s wife took a job at the local Amazon warehouse sorting packages four days a week, working double shifts on two of those days.
“We’re…scared,” Brown tells me. He chooses the word slowly and deliberately before releasing a nervous laugh. Brown and his wife started the business, Wolfpack Promotionals, in 2014. After limping along for a few years, they earned $200,000 in revenue in 2019, their best year yet. “We were looking at 2020 as a very big year for us,” he says. “At this point, I want a redo.”
Like other small business owners, Brown hoped to take advantage of provisions in the CARES Act, the $2 trillion pandemic relief package Congress passed last month. He asked Wells Fargo—a banking behemoth he’s done business with for years—about applying for a Small Business Administration disaster loan or the Paycheck Protection Program, a pot of money meant to help small businesses cover payroll and other expenses during the coronavirus crisis. (Money for both types of loans comes from the SBA, but the government relies on commercial banks and other lenders to process the PPP loans.)
Brown says Wells Fargo provided no helpful details, and he hasn’t applied for the financing. “For a lot of the SBA stuff and other loans, you have to be ‘bankable,’” Brown tells me. “So if you couldn’t get a loan from the bank before, you’re just screwed. And many of us are in that position.”
By “us,” Brown is referring to fellow Twin Cities entrepreneurs who, like Brown, are black. Many have less-than-stellar credit, a side effect of the lengths they had to go to in order to start their businesses. Technically, the PPP doesn’t require a minimum credit score, but some potential borrowers aren’t convinced the program will live up to that promise. The distrust is no surprise: Discriminatory government policies, dating back to Reconstruction, have made connecting black business owners with financing a daunting task.
“The system has never served them and has been the cause of a lot of harm,” says Felicia Perry, the executive director of the West Broadway Business and Area Coalition, a group that supports businesses in Brown’s neighborhood. “There’s a real trust gap there.”
In a statement, Wells Fargo said it is “working as quickly as possible to assist small business customers with the Paycheck Protection Program…in compliance with the regulations and guidance provided by US Treasury and the SBA.”
When the pandemic took hold in the United States, lawmakers rushed to protect entrepreneurs in a manner that was swift, bipartisan, and—on its face—equitable. “All loan terms will be the same for everyone,” declares the Treasury Department’s PPP fact sheet. But we now know that those equal “terms” did not translate into equal access to the federal funds. Banks screened out businesses that they hadn’t previously lent money to and reportedly gave preferential treatment to wealthier clients.
After just two weeks, the PPP fund ran out of money altogether. On Tuesday, congressional leaders announced a $310 billion deal to replenish it. But the additional money may not be enough to rescue people like Brown. Black business owners headed into the pandemic with smaller savings accounts, more debt, and less access to banks and capital than their white counterparts. The results could be catastrophic. “If you focus just on this moment, you miss the big picture,” says Mehrsa Baradaran, a wealth inequality expert and law professor at the University of California, Irvine. “You have to understand the history of how we got here.”
Walz’s formal decree late last month didn’t actually make much of a difference in Brown’s finances: In March 2019, Wolfpack had pulled in $18,000 dollars in revenue. This March, as fear spread and the economy ground to a halt, it took in just $2,500. When Brown officially closed his shop following the governor’s order, he divvied up the company’s 2020 profits among himself and his four employees, all of whom are now collecting unemployment. The Phillips Family Foundation, a Minnesota non-profit run by the family of Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), has placed a few preorders for when business resumes. “It’s not plugging the hole, but it’s slowing down the leak,” Brown says.
Brown’s current circumstances are all the more heartbreaking when you learn what he went through to open his shop—which is to say, in his words, “hell.” In April 2014, he says, he consulted a financial adviser to secure seed money for $40,000 in printing and embroidery equipment. In the end, he only got $25,000—and the adviser charged a $15,000 fee. A lawyer helped them reverse that payment, but Brown’s wife’s credit score plummeted as the couple struggled to pay the manufacturer. To raise funds, Brown and his wife took out a loan against their home equity; eventually they were threatened with foreclosure. Brown’s wife tapped her state employee retirement account to pay off the debt, but the owner of the loan claims the Browns still owe roughly $2,000 in taxes and fees. These days, Brown ignores their calls—as well as those from his cable provider and his credit card issuer, all clamoring for overdue bills.
The obstacles Brown faced are common among African American entrepreneurs. They tend to rely heavily on their own personal finances to start businesses, despite the fact that the median black household has just one-tenth the wealth that the median white household has. These circumstances make it unlikely that would-be black business owners have liquid capital to spare—or know others who do. “In the case of most African American nascent small businesses owners, there isn’t going to be a ‘friends and family’ round of financing,” says Rachel Atkins, an assistant professor at New York University who studies racial disparities in entrepreneurship. “They don’t have those resources in their personal networks.”
That makes bank loans even more important for black-owned businesses to get off the ground, though their prospects of actually getting the money they need are dim. A 2017 study from the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Cleveland found that black businesses owners apply for funds at a 10 percent higher rate than white-owned firms, but their approval rates are nearly 20 percent lower. When black entrepreneurs do get approved for financing, only 40 percent receive the full amount they requested, compared to 70 percent of white business owners. Forty percent of black business owners surveyed are so pessimistic about their chances of being approved for bank loans that they don’t even bother to apply.
A recent study by the New York Fed classified nearly three-quarters of white-owned firms as “healthy” or “stable,” while only 43 percent of black-owned businesses earned those ratings. “From the moment W.E.B. DuBois started collecting data through today, most black businesses are tiny—‘pebbles on the shore of business enterprise,’ he called them,” UC Irvine’s Baradaran explains. “They’re undercapitalized and highly vulnerable to any dip or sway in the economy.”
These factors are now conspiring against black businesses as they struggle to obtain PPP loans. Black-owned firms often rely on community-development financial institutions—lenders focused on underserved populations—many of which still lacked access to the SBA system as of last week. In recent years, large banks have closed more branches in majority-black communities than elsewhere, an exodus that’s stymied the flow of credit into local small businesses. And because banks receive bigger fees for bigger loans, they’re incentivized to prioritize the applications of larger firms. “It makes total sense that black-owned firms would end up at the bottom of the list,” NYU’s Atkins says. “We’re now witnessing the layering effect of these decisions in the midst of a crisis.”
Perry says those dynamics are already playing out in the majority-black North Minneapolis neighborhood, where she spends much of her time reaching out to businesses to explain the SBA loans’ eligibility criteria. Some business owners she speaks to tell her they haven’t looked at the applications yet. There’s a variety of reasons: Some are dealing with the acute trauma of loved ones dying from the disease. Some don’t feel like they have the information they need to submit an application. Others feel too discouraged by past financing failures to try. She doesn’t know of any that have successfully received federal funding.
The structure of the loans is also an issue. Though a PPP loan can be forgiven if it’s used to cover payroll, rent, and utility costs, it’s likely that only 25 percent of it can be used for non-payroll expenses. Most black-owned firms are like Brown’s—they have just a handful of employees, making them eligible for a much smaller slice of the pie.
Any part of a PPP loan that isn’t forgiven must be paid back within two years, which could pose a hardship for entrepreneurs like Brown who are dealing with other forms of debt. And the terms of debt relief offered to black Americans have historically put them at a disadvantage. Amanda Fischer, the policy director for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, cites the Home Affordable Modification Program, a federal initiative to help struggling homeowners avoid foreclosure during the Great Recession. “There were studies showing that black and brown borrowers were less likely to get loan modifications, and when they got loan modifications, the terms were more punitive than white borrowers,” Fischer explains. “I’m thinking about businesses working ad hoc with debt collectors and landlords to work out deals to bridge the gap. There’s probably going to be discrimination that plays out that way, too.”
The disparity is grounded in a legacy of discriminatory policy. Baradaran points to the systematic exclusion of blacks from government-backed programs—such as the GI Bill and Federal Housing Administration loans—that allowed white families to build wealth over the course of the 20th century but left black families further behind. And she compares the potential for an extinction-level event among black businesses to the higher COVID-19 death rates among black Americans—a result of segregation, economic inequality, and environmental injustice.
“Coronavirus is clearly not racist: It’s a big, dumb virus that we’re all susceptible to,” she explains. “But any colorblind policy, whether one that deals with public health or access to credit, is going to be unfair to black communities”—because colorblind policies fail to account for the impact of racial inequality.
Right now, colorblind policy is the only policy Congress has. Democrats had initially demanded $125 billion be set aside for small and mid-size banks, in hopes of reaching more vulnerable entrepreneurs. They also called for “improvements to ensure all eligible small businesses can access this critical funding and are not turned away by banks.” The final package earmarked just $60 billion for smaller lenders, and no such improvements were included.
So what else can be done? Bharat Ramamurti—a former staffer for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) who serves on the congressional panel overseeing coronavirus relief funds—recommends paying banks a flat fee for each transaction and connecting them with applicants via independent clearinghouses, in order to prevent smaller, less-connected firms from getting shut out.
Fischer wants to see aggressive oversight of the lending and a moratorium on debt collection. In a paper published this month, she also advocates for the elimination of the rules governing how the PPP funds can be used. She warns that if the loans that do reach smaller firms end up being too modest to help them retain their employees, those businesses could be stuck with debts they can’t pay back. The end result, she predicts, will be that a widening wealth gap as industries shrink and consolidate around a few key players.
Brown worries this is already happening in his Minneapolis neighborhood. “The African American population has little or nothing when it comes to commercial stores, businesses, housing—you know, in terms of ownership,” he says, and the coronavirus crisis is only making things worse. “The existing population is losing ground.”
For now, Brown is making masks out of discarded T-shirt samples and donating them to the Hennepin County Medical Center, local police officers, and some elderly neighbors. He volunteers with his local business association to distribute hand sanitizer to the few intrepid business owners whose doors remain open. He doesn’t have a lot of faith that the government will do much to help him.
“Until those senators and representatives are put in the same boat as the population they’re supposed to be representing, we’ll never get anywhere,” Brown says. “They have to struggle like we are struggling before they can actually understand.”
Held accountable????
Who will be held accountable for Trump's nonsensical ideas?
Opinion by Frida Ghitis
Just when we thought President Donald Trump might be inclined to tamp down his impulses to suggest unproven and dangerous cures for Covid-19, Thursday's nightly performance brought an even wilder parade of ideas from the President. Perhaps we should consider injecting disinfectants, Trump posited, prompting the maker of Lysol to issue an urgent warning, "under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route)."
At the same time, the President is perpetuating this dangerous idea, the doctor responsible for helping to find a solution, a vaccine, says he was removed for challenging the nonsensical ideas of President Donald Trump about hydroxychloroquine. Dr. Rick Bright, head of the vaccine program, says he lost his job for demanding Trump's ideas be subjected to rigorous testing. Bright was dismissed as the director of the US Department of Health and Human Services' Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and demoted to a role in the National Institutes of Health.
In response to Bright's claim, Trump said that he "never heard of him." "The guy says he was pushed out of a job, maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. You'd have to hear the other side."
Who will be held accountable for this and the mounting number of outrages that have prolonged the crisis and led to more deaths?
"What do you have to lose?" Trump asked Americans during an April 4 news briefing, as he urged anxious viewers to take the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine -- which we now know could lead to more deaths -- for Covid-19.
The answer, of course, is their lives. What do the people of Georgia have to lose, he may ask again, as he initially cheered on Gov. Brian Kemp, who is disregarding Trump's own guidelines and starting to reopen the state at the height of a pandemic.
In the face of alarm at Kemp's plan and at his support, Trump unexpectedly reversed course on Wednesday evening, announcing that he told the governor that he "strongly" disagreed with reopening certain facilities like spas, beauty shops and tattoo parlors.
With that, he backtracked on one of his errors, perhaps hoping to avoid blame for yet another surge of Covid-19 patients.
Another grievous error would have added to the long series of presidential missteps along this road, mistakes for which neither Trump nor his acolytes and promoters, including Fox News -- which offers a megaphone for every manner of Trump outrage -- never apologize.
Will the Trump administration be called to account for the extraordinarily serious accusations by Dr. Bright, who, in a statement, said he resisted pressure to pursue Trump's drug panacea and objected to "rushing blindly towards unproven drugs" which could be "disastrous and result in countless more deaths."
For weeks, Trump and Fox News hosts and guests incessantly repeated unproven claims about hydroxychloroquine. The country's top infectious disease specialist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, tried valiantly to lower expectations. But Trump persisted. "I really think they should take it," he advised, blocking Fauci from commenting. We all wished there were a quick, easy cure, but we also wanted a responsible leader.
"It's just a feeling," he explained as he promoted the drug from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters. I'm a "smart guy." Trump said he had ordered 28 million doses; he wrongly claimed the US Food and Drug Administration approving hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 treatment. People rushed to buy it, creating shortages for those who needed it to treat diseases like lupus.
Now, a US Veterans Health Administration study found Covid-19 patients who took Trump's "game changer" drug were more likely to die than those who didn't. In the study, 27.8% of those who took it died, compared to 11.4% who did not. A study in France was stopped to prevent worse damage. The same happened with a Brazilian study.
The President doesn't talk about the drug anymore. Neither do personalities on Fox News, which banged the drum relentlessly, with its quackery-prone doctors promoting it on multiple shows, exciting the Fox-loving Trump, who reportedly met at the White House with Fox's Laura Ingraham and two of her TV show's regular guests to discuss the promise of hydroxychloroquine, according to the Washington Post.
The time he and the network wasted promoting the drug could have been used guiding the public on ways to protect themselves, on ways to protect the community, to protect all of us.
Trump and everyone else who magnifies the President's most irresponsible exhortations bears guilt in this disaster.
Back when the pandemic was already spreading and Trump kept saying it was all under control, disparaging calls for urgent action as a "hoax" against him by Democrats and the media, his favorite propagandists on Fox kept telling the same lies. Notorious among them was Sean Hannity, though he said earlier this month in an interview that he never called it a "hoax."
Hannity, of course, was echoing Trump downplaying of the virus. Survey after survey found that Republicans from the beginning were less concerned about the virus.
One hesitates to blame individuals -- politicians or celebrities -- for the killings executed by a virus. But the inescapable fact is that the message from Trump, Hannity and others in right-wing media made it easier for the virus to carry out its deadly mission.
Will anyone be held responsible for the egregious misinformation?
One might think this is an ethical question better left for the future, one we should discuss when the carnage has ended. But that would be a mistake because Trump and his helpers are continuing to splash gasoline on the raging fire.
Before Gov. Kemp announced that by the end of this week people can start getting their nails done and getting a tattoo, perhaps he should have spent a few hours at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany, Georgia, where, as the Los Angeles Times reported, the staff was "struggling to treat a community afflicted with one of the most intense coronavirus rates in the nation."
Many in Georgia are furious at the governor; mayors are scrambling to figure out how to protect residents from a dangerous order that bars cities from imposing restrictions.
And while the President has backtracked in his support of the governor's move, it's clear that Kemp and other governors are following Trump's lead in accelerating the reopening before scientists think it's safe.
Trump, too, should show us how convinced he is about the need to "liberate" states from stay-at-home orders by spending some time in a hospital swamped with Covid-19 patients.
The Georgia order, which would also reopen movie theatres by Monday, comes before the state meets the official White House conditions for beginning to reopen: 14 days of decreasing cases, "robust" testing for antibodies and the coronavirus among health care workers. None of that has happened.
Now, Trump has reversed his position on Georgia but not before first expressing support for Kemp's decisions and sending a strong message to his supporters that he favors an accelerated reopening of the economy. He's sending mixed messages at a most dangerous time.
Georgia is nowhere near ready to open. The scientific model the White House has been using says stay-at-home orders should remain in place in Georgia until at least June. CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield is warning that a second wave of the virus could hit even harder next winter, when the seasonal flu is also expected.
Trump's actions and words could all but ensure that that's precisely what happens. And his accomplices at Fox News will magnify the harmful impact of wrongheaded decisions. We will all pay the price, and they will never apologize. They will never admit they got any of it wrong. It will be left to the American people to reach a verdict -- and proceed accordingly.
Opinion by Frida Ghitis
Just when we thought President Donald Trump might be inclined to tamp down his impulses to suggest unproven and dangerous cures for Covid-19, Thursday's nightly performance brought an even wilder parade of ideas from the President. Perhaps we should consider injecting disinfectants, Trump posited, prompting the maker of Lysol to issue an urgent warning, "under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route)."
At the same time, the President is perpetuating this dangerous idea, the doctor responsible for helping to find a solution, a vaccine, says he was removed for challenging the nonsensical ideas of President Donald Trump about hydroxychloroquine. Dr. Rick Bright, head of the vaccine program, says he lost his job for demanding Trump's ideas be subjected to rigorous testing. Bright was dismissed as the director of the US Department of Health and Human Services' Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and demoted to a role in the National Institutes of Health.
In response to Bright's claim, Trump said that he "never heard of him." "The guy says he was pushed out of a job, maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. You'd have to hear the other side."
Who will be held accountable for this and the mounting number of outrages that have prolonged the crisis and led to more deaths?
"What do you have to lose?" Trump asked Americans during an April 4 news briefing, as he urged anxious viewers to take the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine -- which we now know could lead to more deaths -- for Covid-19.
The answer, of course, is their lives. What do the people of Georgia have to lose, he may ask again, as he initially cheered on Gov. Brian Kemp, who is disregarding Trump's own guidelines and starting to reopen the state at the height of a pandemic.
In the face of alarm at Kemp's plan and at his support, Trump unexpectedly reversed course on Wednesday evening, announcing that he told the governor that he "strongly" disagreed with reopening certain facilities like spas, beauty shops and tattoo parlors.
With that, he backtracked on one of his errors, perhaps hoping to avoid blame for yet another surge of Covid-19 patients.
Another grievous error would have added to the long series of presidential missteps along this road, mistakes for which neither Trump nor his acolytes and promoters, including Fox News -- which offers a megaphone for every manner of Trump outrage -- never apologize.
Will the Trump administration be called to account for the extraordinarily serious accusations by Dr. Bright, who, in a statement, said he resisted pressure to pursue Trump's drug panacea and objected to "rushing blindly towards unproven drugs" which could be "disastrous and result in countless more deaths."
For weeks, Trump and Fox News hosts and guests incessantly repeated unproven claims about hydroxychloroquine. The country's top infectious disease specialist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, tried valiantly to lower expectations. But Trump persisted. "I really think they should take it," he advised, blocking Fauci from commenting. We all wished there were a quick, easy cure, but we also wanted a responsible leader.
"It's just a feeling," he explained as he promoted the drug from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters. I'm a "smart guy." Trump said he had ordered 28 million doses; he wrongly claimed the US Food and Drug Administration approving hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 treatment. People rushed to buy it, creating shortages for those who needed it to treat diseases like lupus.
Now, a US Veterans Health Administration study found Covid-19 patients who took Trump's "game changer" drug were more likely to die than those who didn't. In the study, 27.8% of those who took it died, compared to 11.4% who did not. A study in France was stopped to prevent worse damage. The same happened with a Brazilian study.
The President doesn't talk about the drug anymore. Neither do personalities on Fox News, which banged the drum relentlessly, with its quackery-prone doctors promoting it on multiple shows, exciting the Fox-loving Trump, who reportedly met at the White House with Fox's Laura Ingraham and two of her TV show's regular guests to discuss the promise of hydroxychloroquine, according to the Washington Post.
The time he and the network wasted promoting the drug could have been used guiding the public on ways to protect themselves, on ways to protect the community, to protect all of us.
Trump and everyone else who magnifies the President's most irresponsible exhortations bears guilt in this disaster.
Back when the pandemic was already spreading and Trump kept saying it was all under control, disparaging calls for urgent action as a "hoax" against him by Democrats and the media, his favorite propagandists on Fox kept telling the same lies. Notorious among them was Sean Hannity, though he said earlier this month in an interview that he never called it a "hoax."
Hannity, of course, was echoing Trump downplaying of the virus. Survey after survey found that Republicans from the beginning were less concerned about the virus.
One hesitates to blame individuals -- politicians or celebrities -- for the killings executed by a virus. But the inescapable fact is that the message from Trump, Hannity and others in right-wing media made it easier for the virus to carry out its deadly mission.
Will anyone be held responsible for the egregious misinformation?
One might think this is an ethical question better left for the future, one we should discuss when the carnage has ended. But that would be a mistake because Trump and his helpers are continuing to splash gasoline on the raging fire.
Before Gov. Kemp announced that by the end of this week people can start getting their nails done and getting a tattoo, perhaps he should have spent a few hours at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany, Georgia, where, as the Los Angeles Times reported, the staff was "struggling to treat a community afflicted with one of the most intense coronavirus rates in the nation."
Many in Georgia are furious at the governor; mayors are scrambling to figure out how to protect residents from a dangerous order that bars cities from imposing restrictions.
And while the President has backtracked in his support of the governor's move, it's clear that Kemp and other governors are following Trump's lead in accelerating the reopening before scientists think it's safe.
Trump, too, should show us how convinced he is about the need to "liberate" states from stay-at-home orders by spending some time in a hospital swamped with Covid-19 patients.
The Georgia order, which would also reopen movie theatres by Monday, comes before the state meets the official White House conditions for beginning to reopen: 14 days of decreasing cases, "robust" testing for antibodies and the coronavirus among health care workers. None of that has happened.
Now, Trump has reversed his position on Georgia but not before first expressing support for Kemp's decisions and sending a strong message to his supporters that he favors an accelerated reopening of the economy. He's sending mixed messages at a most dangerous time.
Georgia is nowhere near ready to open. The scientific model the White House has been using says stay-at-home orders should remain in place in Georgia until at least June. CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield is warning that a second wave of the virus could hit even harder next winter, when the seasonal flu is also expected.
Trump's actions and words could all but ensure that that's precisely what happens. And his accomplices at Fox News will magnify the harmful impact of wrongheaded decisions. We will all pay the price, and they will never apologize. They will never admit they got any of it wrong. It will be left to the American people to reach a verdict -- and proceed accordingly.
Sad.. Is it still a lie? Is it still a Democratic scam???
At least 50,000 people have died in the US from coronavirus
There are at least 50,031 reported deaths from coronavirus in the US, according to Johns Hopkins University's tally of deaths in the United States.
On Friday morning, Johns Hopkins is reporting at least 870,468 coronavirus cases in the United States.
There are at least 50,031 reported deaths from coronavirus in the US, according to Johns Hopkins University's tally of deaths in the United States.
On Friday morning, Johns Hopkins is reporting at least 870,468 coronavirus cases in the United States.
Who is bailing out who???
Gov. Andrew Cuomo Bulldozes Mitch McConnell For 'Dumb,' 'Vicious' State Bankruptcy Idea
The NY governor was on a tear about Mitch McConnell's shrugging off the economic desperation of many states, by suggesting they declare bankrupty.
By Aliza Worthington
Gov. Andrew Cuomo let loose his wrath in Sen. Mitch McConnell's direction after McConnell blithely suggested states should simply declare bankruptcy if their economies were suffering that badly. God forbid they should include money for the state governments to function, let alone recover from this crushing pandemic, in the second trillion-dollar economic stimulus package Congress is trying to pass.
GOV. CUOMO: This is really one of the dumb ideas of all time. And I said to my colleagues in Washington, I would have insisted that state and local funding was in this current bill. Because I don't believe they want to fund state and local governments. And not to fund state and local governments is incredibly shortsighted. They want to fund small business, fund the airlines. I understand that. But state and local government funds police, and fire, and teachers, and schools. How do you not fund police, and fire, and teacher, and schools in the midst of this crisis?
[...]
And then to suggest we're concerned about the economy. States should declare bankruptcy. That's how you're going to bring this national economy back, by states declaring bankruptcy? You want to see that market fall through the cellar? Let New York State declare bankruptcy. Let Michigan declare bankruptcy. Let Illinois declare bankruptcy. Let California declare bankruptcy. You will see a collapse of this national economy. So, just DUMB.
Then, though, Gov. Cuomo lit into the Senator for his absolute heartlessness. How much does it cost for that cryogenic chamber McConnell must step into each hour to keep his blood so damn icy cold? Cuomo ripped him apart for his cruelty.
GOV CUOMO: VICIOUS is saying when Senator McConnell said this is a blue state bailout. What he's saying is if you look at the states that have coronavirus problems, they tend to be democratic states -- New York, California, Michigan, Illinois, they are Democratic states. So if you fund states that are suffering from the coronavirus, they're Democratic states. Don't help New York state because it is a Democratic state. How UGLY a thought. Just think of -- just think of what he is saying. People died. 15,000 people died in New York. But they were predominantly Democrats. So why should we help them?
I mean, for crying out loud, if there was ever a time you're going to put aside -- for you to put aside your pettiness and your partisanship, and this political lens that you see the world through, Democrat and Republican and we help Republicans but we don't help Democrats. That's not who we are! That's not who we are as a people. If there was ever a time for humanity and decency, is now is the time. If there was ever a time to stop your political — obsessive, political bias and anger, which is what it has morphed into, just a political anger, now is the time. And you want to politically divide this nation now with all that's going on? How irresponsible and how reckless?
Viciousness. Irresponsibility. Recklessness. Obsessiveness. Anger. Pettiness. Stupidity. These are in the lifeblood of the GOP. This is the full description of Trump. And they're all in heavy rotation on McConnell's playlist.
Once the governor had moved on to the question period, he brought things back to the Senate Majority Leader, because he had just one more truth bomb to drop.
GOV. CUOMO: Let me just go back to my self-proclaimed Grip Reaper Senator McConnell for another second. He represents the State of Kentucky, okay? When it comes to fairness, New York State puts much more money into the federal pot than it takes out. Okay? At the end of the year we put in to that federal pot $116 billion more than we take out.
His state, the state of Kentucky, takes out $148 billion more than they put in. So he's a federal legislator. He is distributing the federal pot of money. New York puts in more money to the federal pot than it takes out. His state takes out more than it puts in. Senator McConnell, who's getting bailed out here? It's YOUR state that is living on the money that WE generate. YOUR state is getting bailed out. Not MY state.
Let's be real about who truly is getting the bailout, Mitch.
The NY governor was on a tear about Mitch McConnell's shrugging off the economic desperation of many states, by suggesting they declare bankrupty.
By Aliza Worthington
Gov. Andrew Cuomo let loose his wrath in Sen. Mitch McConnell's direction after McConnell blithely suggested states should simply declare bankruptcy if their economies were suffering that badly. God forbid they should include money for the state governments to function, let alone recover from this crushing pandemic, in the second trillion-dollar economic stimulus package Congress is trying to pass.
GOV. CUOMO: This is really one of the dumb ideas of all time. And I said to my colleagues in Washington, I would have insisted that state and local funding was in this current bill. Because I don't believe they want to fund state and local governments. And not to fund state and local governments is incredibly shortsighted. They want to fund small business, fund the airlines. I understand that. But state and local government funds police, and fire, and teachers, and schools. How do you not fund police, and fire, and teacher, and schools in the midst of this crisis?
[...]
And then to suggest we're concerned about the economy. States should declare bankruptcy. That's how you're going to bring this national economy back, by states declaring bankruptcy? You want to see that market fall through the cellar? Let New York State declare bankruptcy. Let Michigan declare bankruptcy. Let Illinois declare bankruptcy. Let California declare bankruptcy. You will see a collapse of this national economy. So, just DUMB.
Then, though, Gov. Cuomo lit into the Senator for his absolute heartlessness. How much does it cost for that cryogenic chamber McConnell must step into each hour to keep his blood so damn icy cold? Cuomo ripped him apart for his cruelty.
GOV CUOMO: VICIOUS is saying when Senator McConnell said this is a blue state bailout. What he's saying is if you look at the states that have coronavirus problems, they tend to be democratic states -- New York, California, Michigan, Illinois, they are Democratic states. So if you fund states that are suffering from the coronavirus, they're Democratic states. Don't help New York state because it is a Democratic state. How UGLY a thought. Just think of -- just think of what he is saying. People died. 15,000 people died in New York. But they were predominantly Democrats. So why should we help them?
I mean, for crying out loud, if there was ever a time you're going to put aside -- for you to put aside your pettiness and your partisanship, and this political lens that you see the world through, Democrat and Republican and we help Republicans but we don't help Democrats. That's not who we are! That's not who we are as a people. If there was ever a time for humanity and decency, is now is the time. If there was ever a time to stop your political — obsessive, political bias and anger, which is what it has morphed into, just a political anger, now is the time. And you want to politically divide this nation now with all that's going on? How irresponsible and how reckless?
Viciousness. Irresponsibility. Recklessness. Obsessiveness. Anger. Pettiness. Stupidity. These are in the lifeblood of the GOP. This is the full description of Trump. And they're all in heavy rotation on McConnell's playlist.
Once the governor had moved on to the question period, he brought things back to the Senate Majority Leader, because he had just one more truth bomb to drop.
GOV. CUOMO: Let me just go back to my self-proclaimed Grip Reaper Senator McConnell for another second. He represents the State of Kentucky, okay? When it comes to fairness, New York State puts much more money into the federal pot than it takes out. Okay? At the end of the year we put in to that federal pot $116 billion more than we take out.
His state, the state of Kentucky, takes out $148 billion more than they put in. So he's a federal legislator. He is distributing the federal pot of money. New York puts in more money to the federal pot than it takes out. His state takes out more than it puts in. Senator McConnell, who's getting bailed out here? It's YOUR state that is living on the money that WE generate. YOUR state is getting bailed out. Not MY state.
Let's be real about who truly is getting the bailout, Mitch.
How stupid is stupid??????
Don't inject disinfectants, Lysol warns as Trump raises idea
Kevin Freking
The parent company of Lysol and another disinfectant warned Friday that its products should not be used as an internal treatment for the coronavirus after President Donald Trump wondered about the prospect during a White House briefing.
Trump noted Thursday that researchers were looking at the effects of disinfectants on the virus and wondered aloud if they could be injected into people, saying the virus “does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”
That prompted a strong warning from the maker of disinfectants Lysol and Dettol, which said it was issuing a statement to combat “recent speculation.”
“As a global leader in health and hygiene products, 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),” said the statement from Reckitt Benckiser.
Trump has often talked up prospects for new therapies and offered rosy timelines for the development of a vaccine as he encourages states to move to reopen their economies.
On Thursday, the White House also pitched “emerging” research on the benefits of sunlight and humidity in diminishing the threat of the coronavirus.
Past studies have not found good evidence that the warmer temperatures and higher humidity of spring and summer will help tamp down the spread of the virus.
But William Bryan of the Department of Homeland Security said at a White House briefing Thursday that there are “emerging results” from new research that suggest solar light has a powerful effect in killing the virus on surfaces and in the air. He said scientists have seen a similar effect from higher temperatures and humidity. A biocontainment lab in Maryland has been conducting testing on the virus since February, Bryan said.
“The virus is dying at a much more rapid pace just from exposure to higher temperatures and just from exposure to humidity,” Bryan said.
Trump was asked if it was dangerous to make people think they would be safe by going outside in the heat, considering that so many people have died in Florida.
“I hope people enjoy the sun. And if it has an impact, that’s great,” Trump replied, adding, “It’s just a suggestion from a brilliant lab by a very, very smart, perhaps brilliant man.”
“I’m here to present ideas, because we want ideas to get rid of this thing. And if heat is good, and if sunlight is good, that’s a great thing as far as I’m concerned,” the president said.
Bryan stressed that the emerging results of the light and heat studies do not replace social distancing recommendations.
Earlier in the month, scientific advisers told the White House there’s no good evidence yet that the heat and humidity of summer will rein in the virus without continued public health measures.
Researchers convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine analyzed studies done so far to test virus survival under different laboratory conditions as well as tracking where and how COVID-19 has spread so far.
“Given that countries currently in ‘summer’ climates, such as Australia and Iran, are experiencing rapid virus spread, a decrease in cases with increases in humidity and temperature elsewhere should not be assumed,” the researchers wrote earlier in April in response to questions from the White House Office of Science and Technology.
In addition, the report cited the global lack of immunity to the new virus and concluded, “if there is an effect of temperature and humidity on transmission, it may not be as apparent as with other respiratory viruses for which there is at least some preexisting partial immunity.”
They noted that during 10 previous flu pandemics, regardless of what season they started, all had a peak second wave about six months after the virus first emerged.
In March, Dr. Michael Ryan, the World Health Organization’s emergencies chief. said, “We have to assume that the virus will continue to have the capacity to spread, and it’s a false hope to say yes, it will just disappear in the summertime like influenza.”
Kevin Freking
The parent company of Lysol and another disinfectant warned Friday that its products should not be used as an internal treatment for the coronavirus after President Donald Trump wondered about the prospect during a White House briefing.
Trump noted Thursday that researchers were looking at the effects of disinfectants on the virus and wondered aloud if they could be injected into people, saying the virus “does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”
That prompted a strong warning from the maker of disinfectants Lysol and Dettol, which said it was issuing a statement to combat “recent speculation.”
“As a global leader in health and hygiene products, 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),” said the statement from Reckitt Benckiser.
Trump has often talked up prospects for new therapies and offered rosy timelines for the development of a vaccine as he encourages states to move to reopen their economies.
On Thursday, the White House also pitched “emerging” research on the benefits of sunlight and humidity in diminishing the threat of the coronavirus.
Past studies have not found good evidence that the warmer temperatures and higher humidity of spring and summer will help tamp down the spread of the virus.
But William Bryan of the Department of Homeland Security said at a White House briefing Thursday that there are “emerging results” from new research that suggest solar light has a powerful effect in killing the virus on surfaces and in the air. He said scientists have seen a similar effect from higher temperatures and humidity. A biocontainment lab in Maryland has been conducting testing on the virus since February, Bryan said.
“The virus is dying at a much more rapid pace just from exposure to higher temperatures and just from exposure to humidity,” Bryan said.
Trump was asked if it was dangerous to make people think they would be safe by going outside in the heat, considering that so many people have died in Florida.
“I hope people enjoy the sun. And if it has an impact, that’s great,” Trump replied, adding, “It’s just a suggestion from a brilliant lab by a very, very smart, perhaps brilliant man.”
“I’m here to present ideas, because we want ideas to get rid of this thing. And if heat is good, and if sunlight is good, that’s a great thing as far as I’m concerned,” the president said.
Bryan stressed that the emerging results of the light and heat studies do not replace social distancing recommendations.
Earlier in the month, scientific advisers told the White House there’s no good evidence yet that the heat and humidity of summer will rein in the virus without continued public health measures.
Researchers convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine analyzed studies done so far to test virus survival under different laboratory conditions as well as tracking where and how COVID-19 has spread so far.
“Given that countries currently in ‘summer’ climates, such as Australia and Iran, are experiencing rapid virus spread, a decrease in cases with increases in humidity and temperature elsewhere should not be assumed,” the researchers wrote earlier in April in response to questions from the White House Office of Science and Technology.
In addition, the report cited the global lack of immunity to the new virus and concluded, “if there is an effect of temperature and humidity on transmission, it may not be as apparent as with other respiratory viruses for which there is at least some preexisting partial immunity.”
They noted that during 10 previous flu pandemics, regardless of what season they started, all had a peak second wave about six months after the virus first emerged.
In March, Dr. Michael Ryan, the World Health Organization’s emergencies chief. said, “We have to assume that the virus will continue to have the capacity to spread, and it’s a false hope to say yes, it will just disappear in the summertime like influenza.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)