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Trump doesn't care about the dead. He only cares if they selfishly cost him his reelection
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California's SF Bay Area nailed coronavirus response, everyone should heed its lessons |
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The bucks, the deaths, the misery, the chaos, are 100% on Donald Trump |
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| Trump doesn't care about the dead. He only cares if they selfishly cost him his reelection
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Full story here.
Donald Trump is an absolute disaster of a president. Anyone who makes George W. Bush look good in comparison is beyond redemption. Everything we thought he was—a narcissistic incompetent asshole who surrounds himself with a motley crew of felonious characters—hasn’t just come true, it’s been even worse.
And now, we are seeing in real time what happens when someone who doesn’t give two shits about any other human not-named Ivanka (and only then because he thinks she’s hot) is faced with a mass-death event. Not only did he dismantle the very institutions that could’ve helped prevent or, at the very least, mitigate this disaster, but he’s consistently exacerbated the situation. That is, until someone mentioned to him that hundreds of thousands of dead people aren't exactly making America great.
Mark Sumner went through the too-large, and still-growing list of ways that Trump has f’d this thing up (excerpted below). The central theme, from start to finish, was an obsession with protecting the stock market gains made during his tenure in the White House. And underpinning that obsession with the stock market is one very simple thing, the one thing that Trump cares about: money. The people who kiss his ass at Mar-a-Lago certainly only care about money (it’s not as if he’s hanging out with any deplorables). So he was going to do everything in his considerable power to protect that money.
Now, if there’s one thing the impeached president can do it’s manipulate a media cycle. He’s downright masterful. Everything is a show, everything is a ratings gambit. What happened before and what will happen in the future are utterly irrelevant to the moment. He says what needs to be said to win the moment. That’s why he can say the coronavirus is a hoax one day, and then the next claim, with all the sincerity in the world, that he always knew the pandemic was serious. It’s why we joke “there’s always a tweet.”
He stands for nothing except for whatever suits him best the exact second in time. And when it was seemingly advantageous to keep the stock market happy, Trump said exactly what he needed to say to pretend that everything was fine. It didn’t matter that the market finally stopped paying attention to Trump and erased all the gains it made over the last three years. He had his alternate reality, and it didn’t matter that his inaction was going to get people killed (as his own advisers were frantically telling him). It never occurred to him to care.
Which is why a few days ago, he kept insisting that he would reopen the country on Easter (which was never a thing he had power to do), because “the cure was worse than the problem” (a phrase he heard on Fox News, of course). And then yesterday, he was all “somber” as he admitted that well, maybe a couple hundred thousand people will die, and that would be a great success, a “good job,” because Trump never fails.
But something did change, and it wasn’t concern over human life. He’d already shown repeatedly that the stock market was more important to him than anyone’s grandma. Finally, someone convinced him that no one would think that an America with mass graves was really all that great, and they certainly wouldn't to keep that.
“One former White House official said Trump’s reelection campaign advisors are terrified that the coronavirus outbreak, which so far has hit largely Democratic coastal cities hardest, will soon scythe across the rural areas that remain deeply loyal to Trump,” reported the LA Times.” The advisors have warned Trump that the political consequences at the ballot box in November will be even worse if he is seen as too lax. ‘Pay attention. You’re going to lose the election,’ the former official said, summarizing the intervention.”
Click through to read the rest of the piece, in which I explore, in some depth, Trump's precarious electoral position, and how his lack of humanity is a huge political liability. Remember, Trump doesn’t do humanity. If he weeps at the deaths of hundreds of thousands, it will be tears of rage at the selfish assholes who cost him his reelection.
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| California's SF Bay Area nailed coronavirus response, everyone should heed its lessons
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Full story here.
Meet a real American hero, Sara Cody. She is Santa Clara County’s (San Jose) Public Health Officer, and she was the individual who convinced seven San Francisco Bay Area counties to shut down March 16. Those counties were the areas around San Francisco, Silicon Valley, San Jose, and Oakland/Berkeley, with a population of around 7 million.
 Sara Cody, Santa Clara County Public Health Officer (Associated Press)
”She had just gotten off the phone with health officers Tomas Aragon from San Francisco and Morrow from San Mateo County. They debated the race-against-time decision, the consequences for faltering — the kinds of stuff of Hollywood scripts,” reported the San Jose Mercury News. “They compared the trend lines of COVID-19 cases in the Bay Area with Italy’s a week and a half earlier, just before the situation there turned dire. If they didn’t take bold action, the Bay Area could be next. ‘It was clear to me already how quickly it was moving, and that’s what gave me a sense of urgency,’ Cody said. ‘We just needed to embrace the risk and do it.’”
Because of her actions, the San Francisco region appears to have its COVID-19 problem under control (furiously knocking on wood), while parts of the country burn. Meanwhile, places like Texas and Florida refuse to learn the lessons.
This chart, from a week ago, pretty much says it all. The San Francisco Bay Area had more confirmed cases than New York City on March 10, 14 to 7. But look what happened in the days afterward:
Of course, the number of confirmed cases doesn’t reflect the number of actual afflicted. I have a close friend nearby who clearly has COVID-19, but her symptoms are too mild to get tested. So how do we know that the chart just doesn’t reflect more robust testing in NYC? Well, you can see the disparity just as clearly, and far more painfully, in the death toll. While New York has suffered 1,139 deaths as I write this, the number in the SF Bay Area is 65.
What can account for this disparity? The biggest difference is Sarah Cody’s heroism—not just in realizing the danger and acting it, but being so incredibly well-respected and persuasive that she got six other surrounding counties to go along. Competence matters. And part of competence is recognizing a problem and moving quickly to address it. No one was faster than Cody and the SF Bay region in shutting things down.
It seems crazy that a four-day head-start on the rest of the state and country could make such a difference, but for a disease that spreads exponentially, every single day matters. Here’s how the SF Bay Area compares to the rest of the state:
And again, it's not just testing. We see the same trends in the daily death counts—with the Bay Area steadily decreasing as a percentage of the overall state count.
Now of course, New York is dense than the Bay Area, about 35% denser than San Francisco. So perhaps it was inevitable that New York would face a tougher task. But California’s early action has dramatically slowed the virus’ death toll compared to much of the country. Remember, California has about 12% of the US population:
Washington State, the first epicenter of the disease in the country, isn’t even in the top 10 anymore, with 15 new deaths yesterday. Curve-flattening methods work, even if it’ll be a couple more weeks before we see numbers in New York and New Jersey begin to come down. That’s the terrible trajectory of this disease, we’re always several weeks behind the curve. But if you do the right thing today, you save lives.
Read the full piece. As usual, I'm condensing what is a much longer piece. But in short, there are lessons to be learned. From the SF Bay Area. From Korea. From China. From Italy. Trump’s inability to assimilate those lessons and apply them nationally is a curse. He can’t see past the immediate moment, and it’s getting people killed. So it’s up to the rest of us to do what we can to apply the lessons within our power and try to limit the damage.
Most of us can’t help increase the supply of ventilators or protective equipment or tests or get Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to get his head out of his ass. But we can urge everyone around us to stay the hell home for non-essential activities. It’s not just the “stay in place” orders that help save lives, it’s our ability to take them seriously and help enforce them.
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| The bucks, the deaths, the misery, the chaos, are 100% on Donald Trump
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By Mark Sumner, Daily Kos
Read the full piece here, because it's well worth it and I'm keeping this summary short.
The United States is in a very bad place in the novel coronavirus pandemic. With more cases than any other nation on the planet, health care systems under strain in cities across the nation, and a rising case fatality rate to accompany that growth, the outlook is nothing less than dire. As Dr. Anthony Fauci has warned, the U.S. could be looking at between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths related to COVID-19 before the primary pandemic is past. And there are reasons to believe those numbers may be optimistic.
No matter that Donald Trump says, that does not mean he did a “good job.” It means that, with months of warning and near-infinite resources, he did a worse job than every other government on the entire planet—a job so awful that when a decade from now someone is unlucky enough to think of Trump, this is what they will remember. This is all they will remember. There was a crisis, Trump failed the nation, and the cost was many, many times worse than 9/11.
Donald Trump may not have actually received a memo entitled “Coronavirus determined to strike in the United States,” but he certainly received its equivalent a hundred times over. From the first revelations by the World Health Organization, it was clear that SARS-CoV-2 represented a genuine threat to the entire world. It was so clear by mid-January that, following a briefing on Jan. 16, Republican senators ditched millions of dollars in stocks in anticipation of the crash ahead.
Sen. Richard Burr didn’t just move around a small part of his portfolio—he bailed from the market with almost everything he had. Sen. Kelly Loeffler switched her investments around to benefit from a nation stranded at home. That’s how clear the coming disaster was based on the information available just over two weeks after the outbreak in China drew the attention of the world.
Keep reading...
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| Other News
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Worldometer coronavirus count
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This is the site I use to track the death toll, both in the United States and around the world. Yesterday, 1,049 people died, totaling 5,102 in all. This is a nightmare, and the idea that Donald Trump can spin 1,000 daily dead as doing a "good job" is ludicrous, particularly since we're still weeks away from the worst of it.
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| Police close some Hobby Lobby locations after stores defy state order and reopen during pandemic |
by Marissa Higgins, Daily Kos
Hobby Lobby is the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision allowing businesses to discriminate on the basis of religion (as, in their case, refusing to cover contraception in their employee health care plans). They stayed open for way too long, claiming God told the owner's wife that they shouldn't close. They are billionaires, but laid off staff with zero severance. And now, they are trying to reopen stores—including in states that have orders against it.
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It’s census time. Here’s what it does, why it’s important, and what to expect amid COVID-19
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by Anoa Change, Our Prism
The decennial census is a count of all of the people in all fifty states and the five U.S. territories—American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands—regardless of citizenship or immigration status. Despite attempts by the Trump administration, citizenship status is not a question asked on the 2020 census.
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COVID-19: Should we all be wearing masks?
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by Mark Sumner, Daily Kos
Leave the N95 masks to health care workers who need them.
What an ordinary cloth mask will definitely do is cut down on the travel of those droplets, in both directions. It may also reduce the number of times you touch your nose or mouth while out and about—assuming you don’t get into a habit of adjusting your mask every 10 seconds. Because you don’t know who is sick, and because you can’t be sure that you’re not sick, and because at this point it probably makes other people simply feel a little better … why not wear a mask? If nothing else, pull a bandana up over your nose, or wrap a scarf around your face. Just don’t throw away a mask in public, and don’t reuse it without washing. And definitely leave the professional masks to the professionals who desperately need them.
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Trump refuses to open Obamacare enrollment to save lives of uninsured
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by Joan McCarter, Daily Kos
The headline says it all. Trump is the biggest a-hole. Seriously, people are dying. We know he doesn't care about that, but 100-240,000 dead Americans won't win him reelection. Why the hell would he oppose this? |
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Markos Moulitsas
Founder, Daily Kos
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