monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Trump needs to wake up, get out of his mother’s basement

Has Anyone Found Trump’s Soul? Anyone?

Do you remember President George W. Bush’s remarks at Ground Zero in Manhattan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks? I can still hear him speaking of national grief and national pride. This was before all the awful judgment calls and fatal mistakes, and it doesn’t excuse them. But it mattered, because it reassured us that our country’s leader was navigating some of the same emotional currents that we were.

Do you remember President Barack Obama’s news conference after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., that left 28 people, including 20 children, dead? I do. Freshest in my memory is how he fought back tears. He was hurting. He cared. And while we couldn’t bank on new laws to prevent the next massacre, we could at least hold on to that.

One more question: Do you remember the moment when President Trump’s bearing and words made clear that he grasped not only the magnitude of this rapidly metastasizing pandemic but also our terror in the face of it?

It passed me by, maybe because it never happened.

In Trump’s predecessors, for all their imperfections, I could sense the beat of a heart and see the glimmer of a soul. In him I can’t, and that fills me with a sorrow and a rage that I quite frankly don’t know what to do with.

Americans are dying by the thousands, and he gloats about what a huge, rapt television audience he has. They’re confronting financial ruin and not sure how they’ll continue to pay for food and shelter, and he reprimands governors for not treating him with adequate adulation.
He’s not rising to the challenge before him, not even a millimeter. He’s shriveling into nothingness.

On Friday, when Trump relayed a new recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that all Americans wear face masks in public places, he went so far out of his way to stress that the coverings were voluntary and that he himself wouldn’t be going anywhere near one that he might as well have branded them Apparel for Skittish Losers. I’ve finally settled on his epitaph: “Donald J. Trump, too cool for the coronavirus.”

This is more than a failure of empathy, which is how many observers have described his deficiency. It’s more than a failure of decency, which has been my go-to lament. It’s a failure of basic humanity.

In The Washington Post a few days ago, Michael Gerson, a conservative who worked in Bush’s White House, wrote that Trump’s spirit is “a vast, trackless wasteland.” Not exactly trackless. There are gaudy outposts of ego all along the horizon.

When the direness of this global health crisis began to be apparent, I was braced for the falsehoods and misinformation that are Trump’s trademarks. I was girded for the incompetence that defines an administration with such contempt for proper procedure and for true expertise.

But what has taken me by surprise and torn me up inside are the aloofness, arrogance, pettiness, meanness, narcissism and solipsism that persist in Trump — that flourish in him — even during a once-in-a-lifetime emergency that demands something nobler. Under normal circumstances, these traits are galling. Under the current ones, they’re gutting.

“I don’t take responsibility at all.” “Did you know I was number one on Facebook?” To bother with just one of those sentences while a nation trembles is disgusting. To bother with both, as Trump did, is perverse.

He continues to bash the media, as if the virus were cooked up in the bowels of CNN. He continues to play blame games and to lord his station over those of a lesser political caste, turning governors into grovelers and suggesting that they’re whiny piggies at the federal trough.

He continues his one-man orgy of self-congratulation, so that in the same breath recently he speculated about a toll of 100,000 deaths in America from Covid-19 and crowed about what a great job he’s doing.

And he continues to taunt and smear his perceived political adversaries. Last week, on Fox News, he called Nancy Pelosi “a sick puppy.” This is how he chooses to spend his time and energy?

At those beloved daily briefings of his, where he talks and talks and talks, he sometimes seems to regard what’s happening less as a devastating scourge than as a star-studded event. Just look at the nifty degree of prominence it’s conferring on everyone and everything involved! He has mused aloud about how well known Anthony Fauci has become. He has marveled at the disease’s celebrity profile.

“Become a very famous term — C-O-V-I-D,” he said on Thursday. Was that envy in his voice?

He leaps from tone deafness to some realm of complete sensory and moral deprivation.

“I want to come way under the models,” he said on Friday, referring to casualty projections. “The professionals did the models. I was never involved in a model.”

“At least this kind of model,” he added. No context like a pandemic for X-rated humor.

It’s an extraordinary thing: to fill the air with so many words and have none of them carry any genuine sadness or stirring resolve.

I can hear his admirers grumble that he doesn’t do camera-perfect emotions, that Obama was just a better actor, that Trump is the more authentic man.

To which I answer: What’s the point of having a showman for a president if he can’t put on the right kind of show? Performances count, even if they’re just performances. And Trump clearly isn’t averse to artifice. Just look at his hair.

A cheap shot? I’m feeling cheap. A loss of life and livelihoods on this scale will do that to you.

As of this writing, at least 9,600 people with the coronavirus have died in the United States. That’s more than three times the number killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. New York State alone reported 630 new deaths on Saturday . No school shooting has taken even a small faction of as many lives.

And while I’m not looking to Trump for any panacea, is it too much to ask for some sign that the dying has made an impression on him, that the crying has penetrated his carapace and that he’s thinking about something other than his ratings? I watch. I wait. I suspect I’ll be doing that forever.

Has Anyone Found Trump’s Soul? Anyone?

How Misinformation About the U.S. Needing ‘1 Million Ventilators’ Spread

On March 25, the New York Times published an article titled "Amid Desperate Need for Ventilators, Calls Grow for Federal Intervention." That same day, former Times reporter and author Alex Berenson pointed out a flaw in the article on Twitter. The article asserted that "[t]he United States currently has between 160,000 and 200,000 ventilators, but could need up to a million machines over the course of the outbreak, according to the Society of Critical Care Medicine." As Berenson noted, the study in question did not call for 1 million ventilators, but rather that "as many as one million people in the United States [may] need treatment with a ventilator over the course of the pandemic." [emphasis added]

On the same day the Times posted a correction of that article, the Times published another article that made the same error about the study. The second article, titled "For Dr. Deborah Birx, Urging Calm Has Come With Heavy Criticism," used the identical inaccurate wording that appeared in the first article: "The United States currently has between 160,000 and 200,000 ventilators but could need up to a million over the course of the outbreak, according to the Society of Critical Care Medicine." Despite the first correction, the second correction took several days to appear and did not note the Times's repetition of the error.

The Times was not the only media organization to propagate the error. While she did not specifically cite the Times as her source, on March 26 CNN's Brianna Keilar grilled White House adviser Peter Navarro about ventilators, repeatedly demanding of Navarro, "Are we able to get to a million ventilators?" and ultimately scolded him by saying "Peter, you're wasting everyone's time. You're wasting everyone's time with this. It's 2020. The president was elected in 2016. Can you get to a million ventilators?"

Navarro pushed back by parroting Keilar's question, "Oh, 'we need a million ventilators.' We can't possibly get it. That's like, wildly over what we would need." Keilar responded, "Peter, that's from the Society of Critical Care Medicine. They said, I mean, that's the ceiling, but they say that's a possibility. You have to know that." Just as the Times did twice, Keilar misinterpreted the study's findings. It is unclear if Navarro was familiar with the study, but he did not specifically correct Keilar's error in real time, nor have Keilar or CNN subsequently issued a correction. Keilar's sparring with Navarro was widely reported by other media, further spreading the error.

President Trump takes control of Intelligence Community

The firing of Michael Atkinson, the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, is another step toward the gradual exposure of the Deep State. Atkinson had been nominated for the position by Trump in November 2017. In his letter to Congress the President explained that he had lost confidence in Atkinson. Progressives were up in arms.

Atkinson was described as "the intelligence community’s chief watchdog." But what exactly was he watching? He did notify Congress about a "whistleblower's" complaint concerning Trump's communications with the Ukraine’s president. This led to the President's impeachment. Was there anything else worth watching? How about the FISA applications the FBI obtained to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page? The Justice Department's inspector general found 17 significant errors and omissions, including multiple instances in which the FBI withheld exculpatory information from the court. The CIA had informed the FBI that Page was working with them and regularly reported on his contacts with the Russians. The application cast him as an agent of Russia.

“I want to come way under the models,” he said on Friday, referring to casualty projections. “The professionals did the models. I was never involved in a model.”

“At least this kind of model,” he added. No context like a pandemic for X-rated humor.

What is up with Wisconsin holding a primary today? Are they stupid?

Scott L. Fitzgerald (born November 16, 1963) is an American politician and one-time newspaper publisher. He is a Republican member of the Wisconsin Senate, representing the 13th District since 1994.[1]

In the wake of the 2018 elections when Democratic candidates were elected to the offices of governor, attorney general and secretary of state in Wisconsin, Fitzgerald pushed for legislation to remove powers from the incoming Democratic administration.[2]

Nobody has filled the strategic PPE stockpile since Bush 43

Nowhere is this blame game more evident than in the debate over why we don’t have more ventilators, gloves, N95 masks and other personal protective medical equipment in the national strategic stockpile. The President recently blamed previous administrations, with a particular emphasis on Barack Obama, for depleting the strategic stockpile and not refilling it. This is a claim that’s been picked up by many (primarily conservative) outlets in the past week. So is it true? USA Today did a deep-diving fact check of this claim over the weekend and found that it is, but Obama isn’t the only president open to criticism here. Still, if the claim to be checked is specific to whether or not the Obama administration fulfilled its duties, they concluded that he did not.

I thought Trump had already reached some unprecedented fetid bottom and then this..

And any respect I had for those who still support the man was irretrievably lost.

I wonder if Trump understands he may be thinning his own herd?

He is a sociopath and is concerned only with accumulating wealth and power so that he might dominate and belittle anyone and everyone he chooses.