monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Several Republicans have spoken up against the president and his words, actions and behaviors. Even some of his "friends" of Fox news have indicated the errors of his doings.

Nations, like individuals, reveal themselves at times of crisis. In emergencies of this immense magnitude, it soon becomes evident whether a sitting president is equal to the moment. So what have we learnt about the United States as it confronts this national and global catastrophe? Will lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who have been in a form of legislative lockdown for years now, a paralysis borne of partisanship, rise to the challenge? And what of the man who now sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, who has cloaked himself in the mantle of "wartime president"?

Of the three questions, the last one is the least interesting, largely because Donald Trump's response has been so predictable. He has not changed. He has not grown. He has not admitted errors. He has shown little humility.

Instead, all the hallmarks of his presidency have been on agitated display. The ridiculous boasts - he has awarded himself a 10 out of 10 for his handling of the crisis. The politicisation of what should be the apolitical - he toured the Centers for Disease Control wearing a campaign cap emblazoned with the slogan "Keep America Great".

The mind-bending truth-twisting - he now claims to have fully appreciated the scale of the pandemic early on, despite dismissing and downplaying the threat for weeks. The attacks on the "fake news" media, including a particularly vicious assault on a White House reporter who asked what was his message to frightened Americans: "I tell them you are a terrible reporter." His pettiness and peevishness - mocking Senator Mitt Romney, the only Republican who voted at the end of the impeachment trial for his removal from office, for going into isolation.

His continued attacks on government institutions in the forefront of confronting the crisis - "the Deep State Department" is how he described the State Department from his presidential podium the morning after it issued its most extreme travel advisory urging Americans to refrain from all international travel. His obsession with ratings, or in this instance, confirmed case numbers - he stopped a cruise ship docking on the West Coast, noting: "I like the numbers where they are. I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault." His compulsion for hype - declaring the combination of hydroxycholoroquine and azithromycin "one of the biggest game-changers in the history of medicine," even as medical officials warn against offering false hope.

His lack of empathy. Rather than soothing words for relatives of those who have died, or words of encouragement and appreciation for those in the medical trenches, Trump's daily White House briefings commonly start with a shower of self-congratulation. After Trump has spoken, Mike Pence, his loyal deputy, usually delivers a paean of praise to the president in that Pyongyang-on-the-Potomac style he has perfected over the past three years. Trump's narcissistic hunger for adoration seems impossible to sate. Instead of a wartime president, he has sounded at times like a sun king.

Then there is the xenophobia that has always been the sine qua non of his political business model - repeatedly he describes the disease as the "Chinese virus". Just as he scapegoated China and Mexican immigrants for decimating America's industrial heartland ahead of the 2016 presidential election, he is blaming Beijing for the coronavirus outbreak in an attempt to win re-election.

His attempt at economic stewardship has been more convincing than his mastery of public health. A lesson from financial shocks of the past, most notably the meltdown in 2008, is to "go big" early on. That he has tried to do. But here, as well, there are shades of his showman self. He seems to have rounded on the initial figure of a trillion dollars for the stimulus package because it sounds like such a gargantuan number - a fiscal eighth wonder of the world.

Trump, in common with all populists and demagogues, favours simple solutions to complex problems. He closed America's border to those who had travelled to China, a sensible move in hindsight. However, the coronavirus outbreak has required the kind of multi-pronged approach and long-term thinking that seems beyond him. This has always been a presidency of the here and now. It is not well equipped to deal with a public health and economic emergency that will dominate the rest of his presidency, whether he only gets to spend the next 10 months in the White House or another five years.

The Trump presidency has so often been about creating favourable optics even in the absence of real progress - his nuclear summitry with the North Korean despot Kim Jong-un offers a case in point. But the tricks of an illusionist, or the marketing skills of the sloganeer, do not work here. This is a national emergency, as countless others have pointed out, that can't be tweeted, nicknamed or hyped away. The facts are inescapable: the soaring numbers of the dead.

@oralloy,
Quote:
Only progressives are attacking the president

Typical of Trump: issue a half-baked threat, then say “never mind” and expect gratitude for not carrying the threat out.

Only progressives are attacking the president

President Donald Trump's refusal to implement mass testing for the coronavirus in the United States will have "global repercussions," a South Korean doctor said.

In an interview with Wired this week, Min Pok-kee, whose aggressive approach to tackling the COVID-19 virus in the city of Daegu became a model for South Korea's nationwide response, said Trump's failure meant that "it's inevitable that you become like Italy."

"The United States is very late to this," he said. "And the president and the officials working on it seem to think they aren't late. This has both national and global repercussions.

"It isn't enough for Korea alone to survive. In the US, Trump is talking about taking care of his own, but the entire world has to respond in sync."

He said the president's failure to provide widespread testing was because of his "pride" and "ego."

"Trump has spoken dismissively about testing because of his ego," Min said. "As we scientists see it, he's motivated by pride. The doctors in the US all know that this sort of testing is appropriate."

The US this week became the country with the most confirmed coronavirus cases in the world, with over 85,000 as of Friday.

Meanwhile, South Korea's coronavirus strategy has been lauded as a model for other countries. Since the virus hit the country in mid-February, its government has focused on testing lots of people, even introducing drive-thru testing stations.

South Korea's focus on mass testing has helped it "flatten the curve" and take control of the spread of the virus. As of Friday morning, it had 9,332 confirmed coronavirus cases and 139 deaths.

Min, whose daughter attends college in the US, said social distancing should be "instituted comprehensively" in the US to avoid the national crisis seen in Italy.

"How are existing facilities in the US going to handle all the infected patients? They can't," he told Wired.

"So then it's inevitable that you become like Italy. Korea also could have become like Italy, but we assessed the situation very quickly. What should the United States do? For now, social distancing must be instituted comprehensively, and field hospitals must be built."

Min also criticized the UK's initial response to the virus, saying that people in South Korea were baffled when the UK government pursued a strategy of achieving "herd immunity."

This strategy, which Prime Minister Boris Johnson abandoned last week, was based on the belief that it would be harder for the coronavirus to spread in the future once it has affected a majority of the British population.

Scientists warned Johnson's government that this risked killing thousands of people. Johnson has since switched to a strategy of strict social distancing, with an ambition to significantly ramp up testing.

Min said that "the UK offers a cautionary tale."

"Its first response was to say that people would develop herd immunity, though it switched course a few days later. I'd already been concerned about the capacity of the British system, and this made me very worried.

"Herd immunity only works if you have a vaccine and 85 to 90 percent of the population is inoculated.

"Right now, in the face of an infectious disease with such a high mortality rate, for the UK to resist acknowledging the reality of the virus could translate into tens of thousands of deaths. It was unthinkable for a government to put out such nonsense.

"We in Korea were thinking, 'Are these people in their right mind?'"

Let me summarize the Trump administration/right-wing media view on the coronavirus: It’s a hoax, or anyway no big deal. Besides, trying to do anything about it would destroy the economy. And it’s China’s fault, which is why we should call it the “Chinese virus.”

Oh, and epidemiologists who have been modeling the virus’s future spread have come under sustained attack, accused of being part of a “deep state” plot against Donald Trump, or maybe free markets.

Does all this give you a sense of déjà vu? It should. After all, it’s very similar to the Trump/right-wing line on climate change. Here’s what Trump tweeted back in 2012: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.” It’s all there: it’s a hoax, doing anything about it will destroy the economy, and let’s blame China.

And epidemiologists startled to find their best scientific efforts denounced as politically motivated fraud should have known what was coming. After all, exactly the same thing happened to climate scientists, who have faced constant harassment for decades.

So the right-wing response to Covid-19 has been almost identical to the right-wing response to climate change, albeit on a vastly accelerated time scale. But what lies behind this kind of denialism?

Well, I recently published a book about the prevalence in our politics of “zombie ideas” — ideas that have been proved wrong by overwhelming evidence and should be dead, but somehow keep shambling along, eating people’s brains. The most prevalent zombie in U.S. politics is the insistence that tax cuts for the rich produce economic miracles, indeed pay for themselves, but the most consequential zombie, the one that poses an existential threat, is climate change denial. And Covid-19 has brought out all the usual zombies.

But why, exactly, is the right treating a pandemic the same way it treats tax cuts and climate change?

The force that usually keeps zombie ideas shambling along is naked financial self-interest. Paeans to the virtues of tax cuts are more or less directly paid for by billionaires who benefit from these cuts. Climate denial is an industry supported almost entirely by fossil-fuel interests. As Upton Sinclair put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

However, it’s less obvious who gains from minimizing the dangers of a pandemic. Among other things, the time scale is vastly compressed compared with climate change: the consequences of global warming will take many decades to play out, giving fossil-fuel interests plenty of time to take the money and run, but we’re already seeing catastrophic consequences of virus denial after just a few weeks.

True, there may be some billionaires who imagine that denying the crisis will work to their financial advantage. Just before Trump made his terrifying call for reopening the nation by Easter, he had a conference call with a group of money managers, who may have told him that ending social distancing would be good for the market. That’s insane, but you should never underestimate the cupidity of these people. Remember, Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman, one of the men on the call, once compared proposals to close a tax loophole to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

Also, billionaires have done very well by Trump’s tax cuts, and may fear that the economic damage from the coronavirus will bring about Trump’s defeat, and hence tax increases for people like them.

Paul Krugman’s Newsletter: Get a better understanding of the economy — and an even deeper look at what’s on Paul’s mind.
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But I suspect that the disastrous response to Covid-19 has been shaped less by direct self-interest than by two indirect ways in which pandemic policy gets linked to the general prevalence of zombie ideas in right-wing thought.

First, when you have a political movement almost entirely built around assertions than any expert can tell you are false, you have to cultivate an attitude of disdain toward expertise, one that spills over into everything. Once you dismiss people who look at evidence on the effects of tax cuts and the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, you’re already primed to dismiss people who look at evidence on disease transmission.

This also helps explain the centrality of science-hating religious conservatives to modern conservatism, which has played an important role in Trump’s failure to respond.

Second, conservatives do hold one true belief: namely, that there is a kind of halo effect around successful government policies. If public intervention can be effective in one area, they fear — probably rightly — that voters might look more favorably on government intervention in other areas. In principle, public health measures to limit the spread of coronavirus needn’t have much implication for the future of social programs like Medicaid. In practice, the first tends to increase support for the second.

But I suspect that the disastrous response to Covid-19 has been shaped less by direct self-interest than by two indirect ways in which pandemic policy gets linked to the general prevalence of zombie ideas in right-wing thought.

First, when you have a political movement almost entirely built around assertions than any expert can tell you are false, you have to cultivate an attitude of disdain toward expertise, one that spills over into everything. Once you dismiss people who look at evidence on the effects of tax cuts and the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, you’re already primed to dismiss people who look at evidence on disease transmission.

This also helps explain the centrality of science-hating religious conservatives to modern conservatism, which has played an important role in Trump’s failure to respond.

Second, conservatives do hold one true belief: namely, that there is a kind of halo effect around successful government policies. If public intervention can be effective in one area, they fear — probably rightly — that voters might look more favorably on government intervention in other areas. In principle, public health measures to limit the spread of coronavirus needn’t have much implication for the future of social programs like Medicaid. In practice, the first tends to increase support for the second.

As a result, the right often opposes government interventions even when they clearly serve the public good and have nothing to do with redistributing income, simply because they don’t want voters to see government doing anything well.

The bottom line is that as with so many things Trump, the awfulness of the man in the White House isn’t the whole story behind terrible policy. Yes, he’s ignorant, incompetent, vindictive and utterly lacking in empathy. But his failures on pandemic policy owe as much to the nature of the movement he serves as they do to his personal inadequacies.

Laurence Tribe wrote:
Typical of Trump: issue a half-baked threat, then say “never mind” and expect gratitude for not carrying the threat out.

“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon reportedly said in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with ****.”

Is he this foolish often?

And if so, why is anyone talking with him?

A leading South Korean doctor says Trump's 'pride' and 'ego' are putting the world's health at risk

Progressives are something else.

Min Pok-kee actually is something else. He's a South Korean medical doctor, not a "progressive" as the term is applied in USAmerican political culture.

Obviously you have a defect short time memory

as well.