A Facebook Post of Mine

Would any other president have put his name on official government literature in this way?  This comes dangerously close to being taxpayer-funded campaign advertising.

In 2018, Trump disbanded the White House’s pandemic-response team and ignored a 69-page pandemic plan by the National Security Council. This year, when the coronavirus crisis broke, he downplayed the contagiousness of the disease and its harmfulness. When he finally started to act, it was because of the havoc the disease was playing on the stock market, and running on a strong economy was the centerpiece of his re-election campaign. He began holding regular press briefings on the disease, but he often said counterfactual things and had to be corrected by the experts. Then, he refused to help deliver much-needed aid to some states and said that help for them would need to be a “two-way street.” Then, against all knowledgeable advice, he talked about ending self-quarantines on Easter. 

Now, he has the audacity to put his name on a series of “guidelines” mailed to the public to slow the spread of the coronavirus, as though his name carried an air of authority on the subject. I’m surprised that one of his guidelines isn’t “invest in the stock market.”

Nick Bryant: ‘Coronavirus: What This Crisis Reveals About the U.S. — and Its President’

From the BBC:

...America’s claim to global pre-eminence looks less convincing by the day. While in previous crises, the world’s most powerful superpower might have mobilised a global response, nobody expects that of the United States anymore. The neo-isolationism of three years of America Firstism has created a geopolitical form of social distancing, and this crisis has reminded us of the oceanic divide that has opened up even with Washington’s closest allies.

Read the full article.

David Corn: ‘How the GOP’s War on Government Paved the Way for Trump’s Deadly Incompetence’

Cartoon by Mike Thompson for USA Today Network

From Mother Jones:

For many years, Republicans and conservatives have demonized government. In his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan, the superstar of the right, proclaimed, “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” The well-known conservative strategist and lobbyist Grover Norquist once said, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” The tea party arose in opposition to federal assistance for those Americans slammed by the housing collapse of 2007 and became a movement encompassing anti-government fervor and intense paranoia. And Trump rode this wave into the White House.

On the campaign trail, Trump embraced the right-wing caricature of the federal government as a collection of ineffectual fools who did little more than collect taxes, impose regulations, and hinder American greatness. Trade, health care, the economy — all of this, Trump said, were challenges he could easily take on while delivering spectacular results. Know-how and experience were not needed. Not with a brain like his. Governing was simple. 

 

Trump could only be acceptable to voters who had long been told that government was the problem. He was the antithesis of government experience and expertise. And he made that a selling point and convinced 63 million people to vote for him, as if they were picking a winner on a reality-television show. After all, he was amusing and a kick in the ass of the libs who thought credentials and seriousness actually mattered.

Now the joke isn’t too funny. And tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Americans will die because the GOP’s war on government paved the way for Trump’s incompetence.


Read the full article.

Lili Loofbourow: ‘The Real Reason Trump Started Calling the Virus “Chinese”’

From Slate:

Trump, whose sole priority is his re-election, desperately needs to remind his supporters that the Democrats, scientists, and journalists who took the outbreak seriously from the start are still their enemies. He can achieve that easily enough; all he has to do is reignite a debate over whether something he says is or is not racist. If Trump can make it look like the very people who took the pandemic seriously are now frivolously objecting to his nomenclature, maybe he can claw back any support that may have been waffling.

Read the full article.

Adam Serwer: ‘Donald Trump’s Cult of Personality Did This’

From The Atlantic:

Neither the tide of pestilence sweeping the nation nor the economic calamity that will follow was inevitable. They are the predictable outcomes of the president’s authoritarian instincts, his obvious incompetence, and the propaganda apparatus that has shielded him from accountability by ensuring that the public is blinded to his role in the scale of this disaster.

Read the full article.

Neil Baron: ‘True, Polls Have Bernie Beating Trump. But the Republicans Haven’t Even Started on Him Yet’

 From Newsweek:

Trump will drown out any substantive discussion or defense of Sander’s policies by stoking voter paranoia about socialism and communism. He’ll warn America that a Sanders presidency would destroy the economy. He will invoke his mantra that Medicare for all would “force patients to face massive wait times for treatments and destroy access to quality care.” That’s false, of course, but facts don't matter to a President who has told more than 16,000 lies.

Read the full article.

David Broockman & Joshua Kalla: ‘Bernie Sanders looks electable in surveys — but it could be a mirage’

From Vox:

We found that nominating Sanders would drive many Americans — who would otherwise vote for a moderate Democrat — to vote for Trump, especially otherwise Trump-skeptical Republicans. 

Republicans are more likely to say they would vote for Trump if Sanders is nominated: Approximately 2 percent of Republicans choose Trump over Sanders, but desert Trump when we pit him against a more moderate Democrat like Buttigieg, Biden, or Bloomberg....

But for Sanders to do as well as a moderate Democrat against Trump in November by stimulating youth turnout, his nomination would need to boost turnout of young left-leaning voters enormously — according to our data, one in six left-leaning young people who otherwise wouldn’t vote would need to turn out because Sanders was nominated. There are good reasons to doubt that Sanders’s nomination would produce a youth turnout surge this large....

In one analysis, we disregard what voters say about whether they would vote, and use their demographics and party affiliation to infer the shape of the likely electorate....  With this approach, Sanders trails all three leading moderate candidates in head-to-head polls against Trump.

Read the full article.