monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Kamala Harris
@SenKamalaHarris
· Feb 12
Unacceptable that no one from the Trump administration came before the Homeland Security committee today to discuss the coronavirus. We need public hearings so the American people can hear directly from officials leading the response to the crisis.

Daniel Dale
@ddale8
· 2h
Asked yesterday if he'd suspend domestic plane and train travel, Trump said that'd be tough -- and that people are now getting "very strong tests" both when they get on and off.

They are not being tested at all. Most aren't even being screened in any way. https://cnn.com/2020/04/02/politics/fact-check-trump-plane-and-train-passengers-tested-for-the-coronavirus/index.html

need public hearings so the American people can hear directly from officials leading the response to the crisis.

Trump campaign calls Sessions ‘delusional,’ asks him to stop promoting ties to the president

“The [Sessions campaign] letter even makes the delusional assertion that you are President ‘Trump’s #1 Supporter,’ ” wrote Michael S. Glassner, the chief operating officer of the Trump campaign. “We only assume your campaign is doing this to confuse President Trump’s loyal supporters in Alabama into believing the President supports your candidacy in the upcoming primary run-off election. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

The Navy on Thursday removed the captain of an aircraft carrier crippled by the coronavirus, two days after a blunt letter the officer wrote warning the service of the need to get more sailors off the vessel created a furor.

Navy Capt. Brett Crozier, the commanding officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, was relieved of command at the direction of acting Navy secretary Thomas Modly.

(...)

President Trump left a nine-day sequester in the White House last week to travel to Norfolk, Va., to personally see off the ship as it set sail for New York, saying it would play a “critical role.” The ship’s arrival on Monday was cheered as one of the few bright moments in a grim time for the city.

But the reality has been different. A tangle of military protocols and bureaucratic hurdles has prevented the Comfort from accepting many patients at all.

On top of its strict rules preventing people infected with the virus from coming on board, the Navy is also refusing to treat a host of other conditions. Guidelines disseminated to hospitals included a list of 49 medical conditions that would exclude a patient from admittance to the ship.

Ambulances cannot take patients directly to the Comfort; they must first deliver patients to a city hospital for a lengthy evaluation — including a test for the virus — and then pick them up again for transport to the ship.

(...)

The ship has struggled to fulfill civilian missions in the past. After Hurricane Maria pummeled Puerto Rico in 2017, the Comfort was sent to relieve overextended hospitals, but ended up treating only a handful of patients each day.

A military physician who had previously served on the Navy’s hospital ships said in an interview that conditions on board were suitable for soldiers, but, with its narrow bunked cots instead of modern hospital beds, it was not ideal for treating civilians.

(...)

And of course the Navy Seal guilty of war crimes (he murdered a teenager with his hunting knife then posed for a kill photograph) got a pardon by Trump.

Re: oralloy
"witch hunt"

Politico revealed that an administration official called counterparts in Thailand to ask for PPE only to be told by a confused official on the other end who said that the U.S. was shipping those very supplies to Thailand. One shipment had already arrived, and another was on its way. Vice President Mike Pence, who is in charge of the administration’s coronavirus task force, immediately halted the shipment. It appears that there has been no coordination between the administration and USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, so we have apparently been exporting the very supplies we need at home.

The trump card of Donald Trump was always going to be the economy. If it wasn’t the job market, it was the stock market. You could read it every day in his endless, mindless tweeting or the oh-so-subtle briefings of his campaign aides. November was going to be all about the economy, stupid.

Having ripped off so much of Ronald Reagan’s 1980s paraphernalia – including the slogan he now claims to have invented himself – Trump was all set to ask the voters the same question that Reagan posed just before his own re-election: are you better off than you were four years ago?

For an astonishingly large number of Americans, their answer is a deafeningly loud no. For almost everyone else, the answer is soon to be no.
[...]
We can argue about what number represents the greatest suffering in this pandemic: the number of the victims or the unemployed. Each one of the people affected – by the virus and by the virus-led recession – is more important to consider than the fate of one man watching cable television in the White House.
[...]
So how did he respond to the worst weekly unemployment claims in American history? By changing the subject to the oil industry, suggesting that the Saudis and Russians might just be cutting production. As he bizarrely tweeted to a shell-shocked nation, “If it happens, will be GREAT for the oil & gas industry.”

Only this sociopath of a president could imagine that what’s good for the oil industry is good for the souls of 10 million newly unemployed Americans.

Later in the day, at his so-called press briefing, he said he knew “better than anybody” what people were suffering in the restaurant business. His cure is to allow corporations to make their restaurant expenses deductible from their taxes. If only people were going to work and having boozy business lunches, this might just be an idea worth throwing in the trash can. Instead, it’s yet another presidential brain fart.

“We’ve learned so much, so much, that we really have a chance to be bigger and better and stronger,” he concluded, treating the epic disasters of the pandemic and recession as just one more lesson in his on-the-job training course.

Sadly Trump’s capacity to learn is far smaller than the economy’s capacity to shed jobs. So we have stimulus cash designed to help people through the worst of the pandemic arriving not this month, or next, or the one after that. Some people won’t receive the help until September, according to internal documents from the Internal Revenue Service.
[...]
When it comes to haplessly going on forever, Trump may be something of an expert. It makes up for his lack of expertise in preparing for the invisible enemy that everyone but Trump could actually see coming.

Now the man who could not prepare for one pandemic disaster is even less prepared for the economic disaster unfolding at the same time.
[...]
Today, as unemployment approaches twice that rate, Trump is already trailing Biden in the three battleground states that narrowly won him the presidency four years ago: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Those states just happen to be where the spike in unemployment claims is among the highest in the country.

It won’t be long before Biden’s aides wonder what country they will face next January. November’s election could be just the start of their troubles.