![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdI'm going to have a second update in a bit for everything else.
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Public Citizen
twitter.com/Public_Citizen
13 March 2020
https://twitter.com/Public_Citizen/status/1238559766449926145
"I don't take responsibility at all."
The Trump presidency in one sentence.
[EMBEDDED VIDEO: Trump declaiming nay responsibility for any failures regarding COVID-19, including the above quote.]
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Trump calls Obama’s response to swine flu ‘a disaster.’ Here’s what really happened.
By Aaron Blake
March 13, 2020 at 1:26 p.m. PDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/13/trumps-attempt-tar-obama-biden-with-swine-flu-is-pure-revisionism/
As President Trump confronts growing questions about his and his administration’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, he’s reaching for his security blanket: blaming former president Barack Obama. More specific, he’s attacking how Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden handled the swine flu outbreak in 2009.
To hear Trump tell it, Biden was in charge of the situation, the government handled it extremely poorly, and Trump’s own handling of a public health outbreak is a resounding success by comparison.
Except very little about the 2009 outbreak bears out those claims.
The latest jab came Friday in Trump’s White House news conference, after he was asked whether he bore any responsibility for the shortage of tests. Trump said he doesn’t take any responsibility “at all,” then pivoted back to the swine flu.
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Senator Sherrod Brown, Ohio
twitter.com/SenSherrodBrown
[IN RESPONSE TO: Trump claiming he didn't know anything about shutting down the CDC's pandemic response team two years ago]
https://twitter.com/SenSherrodBrown/status/1238571872779935744
Not true, twitter.com/realDonaldTrump. I wrote to you more than 600 days ago demanding answers after you fired the entire White House pandemic team.
[ATTACHED: letter]
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Jeffrey Lieber
twitter.com/JeffLieber
If you wanna know what twitter.com/Yamiche was asking about, here's Trump ADMITTING to cutting the Pandemic Response Team in 2018. #NastyQuestion
[embedded video]
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Trump Has Sabotaged America’s Coronavirus Response
As it improvises its way through a public health crisis, the United States has never been less prepared for a pandemic.
By Laurie Garrett | January 31, 2020
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump-united-states-public-health-emergency-response/
When Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), declared the Wuhan coronavirus a public health emergency of international concern on Thursday, he praised China for taking “unprecedented” steps to control the deadly virus. “I have never seen for myself this kind of mobilization,” he noted. “China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response.”
The epidemic control efforts unfolding today in China—including placing some 100 million citizens on lockdown, shutting down a national holiday, building enormous quarantine hospitals in days’ time, and ramping up 24-hour manufacturing of medical equipment—are indeed gargantuan. It’s impossible to watch them without wondering, “What would we do? How would my government respond if this virus spread across my country?”
For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it is not just for the public but for the government itself, which largely finds itself in the dark.
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Trump vs. “disease X”
The administration is setting up the US to botch a pandemic response.
By Julia Belluz
Feb 26, 2018
[EDITOR: NOTE 2018 DATE.]
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/2/23/16974012/trump-pandemic-disease-response
The World Health Organization recently released a list of eight diseases most likely to spark a public health emergency. Some we know — like the hemorrhagic fevers Ebola, Lassa, and Marburg, which can cause their victims to bleed out from their gums and eyes.
But further down on the WHO list was a threat ominously described as “disease X.” The X stands for an unknown: a pathogen lurking out there, currently being harbored in animals, with the potential to make the dangerous leap into humans and spread suffering and death around the globe.
While disease X may sound like something that makes you want to run and hug a stuffed animal, it’s exactly the thing public health officials are bracing for. “We don’t know where the next threat will come from,” former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden told Vox. “But we are certain there will be a next time.”
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I ran the White House pandemic office. Trump closed it.
The federal government is moving too slowly, due to a lack of leadership.
By Beth Cameron
13 March 2020
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/nsc-pandemic-office-trump-closed/2020/03/13/a70de09c-6491-11ea-acca-80c22bbee96f_story.html
When President Trump took office in 2017, the White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense survived the transition intact. Its mission was the same as when I was asked to lead the office, established after the Ebola epidemic of 2014: to do everything possible within the vast powers and resources of the U.S. government to prepare for the next disease outbreak and prevent it from becoming an epidemic or pandemic.
One year later, I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like covid-19.
...
It’s impossible to assess the full impact of the 2018 decision to disband the White House office responsible for this work. Biological experts do remain in the White House and in our government. But it is clear that eliminating the office has contributed to the federal government’s sluggish domestic response. What’s especially concerning about the absence of this office today is that it was originally set up because a previous epidemic made the need for it quite clear.
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Trump’s Failing Coronavirus Response is Standard Issue Republicanism in 2020
By Max Moran
March 13, 2020
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/coronavirus-pence-trump-response-republicanism-2020
“He’s got a certain talent for this,” President Donald Trump said of Vice President Mike Pence when entrusting him with the response to the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis. Pence’s perpetual grimace is the new face of the U.S. response to the coronavirus, after a chaotic week when the White House health team’s internecine squabbles and revolving-door corruption got a bit too public for Trump’s comfort. GOP operatives are likely relieved that their “adult in the room” has taken over. After all, Pence may be a fundamentalist zealot, but he is at least an actual “normal” policy-maker.
But a Pence-led response is dangerous, not in spite of, but precisely because he is a typical Republican. His coronavirus task force — which includes several Pence loyalists — is not particularly Trumpian. Its members are long-time political operatives, some of whom even have medical degrees. For the most part, their problem is not incompetence. It’s that they apply their competence and considerable resources in exactly the way a “normal” Republican administration would: protection for the powerful, callousness for the afflicted, and a special disdain for the “other.” In the Pence coronavirus task force, we have a clear window into what a Pence presidency would look like. The answer should scare you.
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Republicans Tried to Sneak Abortion Restrictions into the Coronavirus Bill
Anti-choice lawmakers are stalling emergency legislation.
by Marie Solis
Mar 13 2020
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4ag55g/republicans-coronavirus-emergency-legislation-abortion-restrictions
As lawmakers neared a deal on a coronavirus rescue package that would include paid sick leave and free virus testing, a few roadblocks emerged. Among them: Republican attempts to wedge anti-choice restrictions into the House's relief bill, turning—if momentarily—a public health crisis into an abortion debate.
The tensions reportedly revolved around the Hyde Amendment, a decades-old provision that blocks federal funds from going to abortion services, preventing millions of low-income Americans on Medicaid from accessing abortion care.
According to conservative media, some top Republicans believed a stipulation in the House bill requiring the government to reimburse private laboratories doing coronavirus testing could effectively overturn the Hyde Amendment by establishing a government funding stream not subject to the restrictions. In response, anti-choice lawmakers insisted on including language in the legislation that would reaffirm the principles of the amendment.
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U.S. federal response to coronavirus a ‘fiasco,’ says global health expert
Mar 12, 2020
PBS
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/u-s-federal-response-to-coronavirus-a-fiasco-says-global-health-expert
As the novel coronavirus pandemic takes hold in the U.S., some Americans are expressing concerns over how the government is handling the situation, the availability of testing kits and the U.S. response in comparison to that of other countries. Dr. Ashish Jha of the Harvard Global Health Institute joins Judy Woodruff to discuss the “deeply disappointing” U.S. management of the outbreak.
[TRANSCRIPT AT LINK]
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How testing failures allowed coronavirus to sweep the U.S.
The Trump administration’s decision to forgo a World Health Organization test and create its own had fateful consequences, experts say.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/06/coronavirus-testing-failure-123166
On Saturday Jan. 11 — a month and a half before the first Covid-19 case not linked to travel was diagnosed in the United States — Chinese scientists posted the genome of the mysterious new virus, and within a week virologists in Berlin had produced the first diagnostic test for the disease.
Soon after, researchers in other nations rolled out their own tests, too, sometimes with different genetic targets. By the end of February, the World Health Organization had shipped tests to nearly 60 countries.
The United States was not among them.
Why the United States declined to use the WHO test, even temporarily as a bridge until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could produce its own test, remains a perplexing question and the key to the Trump administration’s failure to provide enough tests to identify the coronavirus infections before they could be passed on, according to POLITICO interviews with dozens of viral-disease experts, former officials and some officials within the administration’s health agencies.
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A Week at the Epicenter of America’s Coronavirus Crisis
By James Ross Gardner
March 13, 2020
https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/a-week-at-the-epicenter-of-americas-coronavirus-crisis
We stopped touching each other on a Wednesday. Or was it Tuesday? Information came at us so fast—confirmed cases, public-health warnings, deaths—you could swear the days of the week had transposed, their order jumbled like everything else. Certainly by Wednesday the handshakes stopped. Hugs weren’t far behind. Even among longtime friends and family. This would soon happen elsewhere in the country, to a degree, but here in the Seattle area, where by week’s end COVID-19 would kill nearly twenty of us, evading physical contact carried extra urgency. Every avoidance felt like an act of heroism. You told yourself you were saving lives, and you were probably right.
Days earlier, on Saturday, February 29th, we woke to news of the first U.S. death from the virus, a man in his fifties, at a hospital in Kirkland, eight miles northeast of Seattle. At nearby Life Care Center of Kirkland, two patients tested positive. The number of confirmed cases tripled within twenty-four hours. By Monday, five were dead, four of them patients at Life Care in their seventies and eighties. Out came declarations of emergency, from the Seattle mayor, Jenny Durkan, the King County executive Dow Constantine, and Governor Jay Inslee.
We didn’t know it yet, but we were living in a kind of laboratory of the country’s future. We were the first. The first to see bus drivers don face masks; the first to take seriously, citywide, singing “Happy Birthday” twice in a row as we washed our hands. The first to experience a unique kind of isolation. Circumventing handshakes helped avoid spreading disease—the elbow bump won out as the preferred alternative—but it also fostered a sense that none of us should be anywhere near one another. On the bus you chose to stand rather than share a seat with a stranger. You thought about crossing the street when approaching too many other pedestrians on a sidewalk. Officials would eventually advise—then demand—that we avoid large public gatherings. We were still out in the world, but barely of it. Alone together.
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A President Unequal to the Moment
By Susan B. Glasser
March 12, 2020
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/a-president-unequal-to-the-moment
Crises clarify. The bigger the crisis, the more the clarity, which is why the incompetence, dishonesty, and sheer callousness of the Trump Presidency have been clearer in recent days than ever before. As the coronavirus, as of Wednesday an official pandemic, spreads, the lives of Americans depend on the decisions made—or not made, as the case may be—by a President uniquely ill-suited to command in this type of public-health catastrophe. In that sense, the last few weeks may well have been the most clarifying of Donald Trump’s Presidency.
In a prime-time address to the nation on Wednesday night, Trump declared war on the “foreign virus,” blaming first China and then the European Union for spreading it, and insisting that it carried “very, very low risk” for Americans. The starkly militaristic and nationalistic tone of the address sounded scary and ignorant and utterly inadequate at a time when the country is being radically upended, with travel halting, workplaces and schools shuttering, and hospitals bracing for impact. The “foreign virus” will not be contained or shut out by a European travel ban, which the President announced, any more than it was by a China travel ban, which he had previously decreed. It is already here in states across the nation, and experts warn that it could infect millions and kill hundreds of thousands in a worst-case scenario. Trump spoke little about that, beyond a vague nudge to Congress to pass a payroll tax cut and a warning to “elderly Americans” to be “very, very careful” and avoid “nonessential travel.” He failed to explain or even address the shocking lack of testing of Americans—a stark contrast to the response by other countries—and did not warn the public about or advise them on how to handle the difficult days ahead. Even the major measure that he announced, the European travel ban, required immediate clarification and correction from Administration officials who said it did not apply to trade, as Trump indicated in his remarks, or permanent residents. His former homeland-security adviser, Thomas Bossert, immediately panned the ban as a “poor use of time & energy.”
In short, Trump was detached from the unfolding reality of a global crisis that is unlike any in memory. I’ve watched Presidential speeches for a few decades now. I cannot recall one that was less equal to the moment.
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The Trump Presidency Is Over
It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain.
March 13, 2020
Peter Wehner
Contributing writer at The Atlantic and senior fellow at EPPC
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/peter-wehner-trump-presidency-over/607969/
When, in January 2016, I wrote that despite being a lifelong Republican who worked in the previous three GOP administrations, I would never vote for Donald Trump, even though his administration would align much more with my policy views than a Hillary Clinton presidency would, a lot of my Republican friends were befuddled. How could I not vote for a person who checked far more of my policy boxes than his opponent?
What I explained then, and what I have said many times since, is that Trump is fundamentally unfit—intellectually, morally, temperamentally, and psychologically—for office. For me, that is the paramount consideration in electing a president, in part because at some point it’s reasonable to expect that a president will face an unexpected crisis—and at that point, the president’s judgment and discernment, his character and leadership ability, will really matter.
“Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them” is how I put it four years ago. “No major presidential candidate has ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his benightedness.” I added this:
"Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe. The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief should send a chill down the spine of every American."
It took until the second half of Trump’s first term, but the crisis has arrived in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s hard to name a president who has been as overwhelmed by a crisis as the coronavirus has overwhelmed Donald Trump.
...
The president’s misinformation and mendacity about the coronavirus are head-snapping. He claimed that it was contained in America when it was actually spreading. He claimed that we had “shut it down” when we had not. He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t. He claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”; it won’t. He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months; Fauci says it will not be available for a year or more.
Trump falsely blamed the Obama administration for impeding coronavirus testing. He stated that the coronavirus first hit the United States later than it actually did. (He said that it was three weeks prior to the point at which he spoke; the actual figure was twice that.) The president claimed that the number of cases in Italy was getting “much better” when it was getting much worse. And in one of the more stunning statements an American president has ever made, Trump admitted that his preference was to keep a cruise ship off the California coast rather than allowing it to dock, because he wanted to keep the number of reported cases of the coronavirus artificially low.
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Survey: White Evangelicals See Trump As 'Honest' And 'Morally Upstanding'
All Things Considered
March 12, 2020
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/12/815097747/survey-most-evangelicals-see-trump-as-honest-and-morally-upstanding
White evangelicals in the United States, the core of President Donald Trump's political base, have far more positive views of his personal conduct and character than other U.S. adults.
By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, white evangelicals are more likely than other Americans to say the terms "morally upstanding" and "honest" describe Trump at least "fairly well," according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center.
The evangelical assessment does come with some reservations. Only about 15% of white evangelicals, for example, say "morally upstanding" describes Trump "very well," while another 45% say the term applies to Trump "fairly well." Two-thirds of U.S. adults as a whole say that characterization fits him "not too well" or "not at all well."
...
One explanation for white evangelicals' attachment to Trump is that they see him as a political ally. The Pew survey found that 63% of white evangelical Protestants believe their side has been "winning politically" under the Trump presidency. That's a dramatic turnaround from 2016, when less than one in four white evangelicals saw themselves as on the winning side.
The Pew results also show white evangelical Christians as showing support for a version of Judeo-Christian nationalism. More than 90% say they want their president to stand up not only for religious beliefs in general, but for their religious beliefs in particular, including biblical teaching.
- "I don't take responsibility at all."
- Trump calls Obama’s response to swine flu ‘a disaster.’ Here’s what really happened.
- I wrote to you more than 600 days ago demanding answers after you fired the entire White House pandemic team.
- Here's Trump ADMITTING to cutting the Pandemic Response Team in 2018.
- Trump Has Sabotaged America’s Coronavirus Response
- Trump vs. “disease X” - The administration is setting up the US to botch a pandemic response.
- I ran the White House pandemic office. Trump closed it.
- Trump’s Failing Coronavirus Response is Standard Issue Republicanism in 2020
- Republicans Tried to Sneak Abortion Restrictions into the Coronavirus Bill
- U.S. federal response to coronavirus a ‘fiasco,’ says global health expert
- How testing failures allowed coronavirus to sweep the U.S.
- A Week at the Epicenter of America’s Coronavirus Crisis
- A President Unequal to the Moment
- The Trump Presidency Is Over
- Survey: White Evangelicals See Trump As 'Honest' And 'Morally Upstanding'
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Public Citizen
twitter.com/Public_Citizen
13 March 2020
https://twitter.com/Public_Citizen/status/1238559766449926145
"I don't take responsibility at all."
The Trump presidency in one sentence.
[EMBEDDED VIDEO: Trump declaiming nay responsibility for any failures regarding COVID-19, including the above quote.]
----- 2 -----
Trump calls Obama’s response to swine flu ‘a disaster.’ Here’s what really happened.
By Aaron Blake
March 13, 2020 at 1:26 p.m. PDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/13/trumps-attempt-tar-obama-biden-with-swine-flu-is-pure-revisionism/
As President Trump confronts growing questions about his and his administration’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, he’s reaching for his security blanket: blaming former president Barack Obama. More specific, he’s attacking how Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden handled the swine flu outbreak in 2009.
To hear Trump tell it, Biden was in charge of the situation, the government handled it extremely poorly, and Trump’s own handling of a public health outbreak is a resounding success by comparison.
Except very little about the 2009 outbreak bears out those claims.
The latest jab came Friday in Trump’s White House news conference, after he was asked whether he bore any responsibility for the shortage of tests. Trump said he doesn’t take any responsibility “at all,” then pivoted back to the swine flu.
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Senator Sherrod Brown, Ohio
twitter.com/SenSherrodBrown
[IN RESPONSE TO: Trump claiming he didn't know anything about shutting down the CDC's pandemic response team two years ago]
https://twitter.com/SenSherrodBrown/status/1238571872779935744
Not true, twitter.com/realDonaldTrump. I wrote to you more than 600 days ago demanding answers after you fired the entire White House pandemic team.
[ATTACHED: letter]
----- 4 -----
Jeffrey Lieber
twitter.com/JeffLieber
If you wanna know what twitter.com/Yamiche was asking about, here's Trump ADMITTING to cutting the Pandemic Response Team in 2018. #NastyQuestion
[embedded video]
----- 5 -----
Trump Has Sabotaged America’s Coronavirus Response
As it improvises its way through a public health crisis, the United States has never been less prepared for a pandemic.
By Laurie Garrett | January 31, 2020
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump-united-states-public-health-emergency-response/
When Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), declared the Wuhan coronavirus a public health emergency of international concern on Thursday, he praised China for taking “unprecedented” steps to control the deadly virus. “I have never seen for myself this kind of mobilization,” he noted. “China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response.”
The epidemic control efforts unfolding today in China—including placing some 100 million citizens on lockdown, shutting down a national holiday, building enormous quarantine hospitals in days’ time, and ramping up 24-hour manufacturing of medical equipment—are indeed gargantuan. It’s impossible to watch them without wondering, “What would we do? How would my government respond if this virus spread across my country?”
For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it is not just for the public but for the government itself, which largely finds itself in the dark.
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Trump vs. “disease X”
The administration is setting up the US to botch a pandemic response.
By Julia Belluz
Feb 26, 2018
[EDITOR: NOTE 2018 DATE.]
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/2/23/16974012/trump-pandemic-disease-response
The World Health Organization recently released a list of eight diseases most likely to spark a public health emergency. Some we know — like the hemorrhagic fevers Ebola, Lassa, and Marburg, which can cause their victims to bleed out from their gums and eyes.
But further down on the WHO list was a threat ominously described as “disease X.” The X stands for an unknown: a pathogen lurking out there, currently being harbored in animals, with the potential to make the dangerous leap into humans and spread suffering and death around the globe.
While disease X may sound like something that makes you want to run and hug a stuffed animal, it’s exactly the thing public health officials are bracing for. “We don’t know where the next threat will come from,” former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden told Vox. “But we are certain there will be a next time.”
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I ran the White House pandemic office. Trump closed it.
The federal government is moving too slowly, due to a lack of leadership.
By Beth Cameron
13 March 2020
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/nsc-pandemic-office-trump-closed/2020/03/13/a70de09c-6491-11ea-acca-80c22bbee96f_story.html
When President Trump took office in 2017, the White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense survived the transition intact. Its mission was the same as when I was asked to lead the office, established after the Ebola epidemic of 2014: to do everything possible within the vast powers and resources of the U.S. government to prepare for the next disease outbreak and prevent it from becoming an epidemic or pandemic.
One year later, I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like covid-19.
...
It’s impossible to assess the full impact of the 2018 decision to disband the White House office responsible for this work. Biological experts do remain in the White House and in our government. But it is clear that eliminating the office has contributed to the federal government’s sluggish domestic response. What’s especially concerning about the absence of this office today is that it was originally set up because a previous epidemic made the need for it quite clear.
----- 8 -----
Trump’s Failing Coronavirus Response is Standard Issue Republicanism in 2020
By Max Moran
March 13, 2020
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/coronavirus-pence-trump-response-republicanism-2020
“He’s got a certain talent for this,” President Donald Trump said of Vice President Mike Pence when entrusting him with the response to the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis. Pence’s perpetual grimace is the new face of the U.S. response to the coronavirus, after a chaotic week when the White House health team’s internecine squabbles and revolving-door corruption got a bit too public for Trump’s comfort. GOP operatives are likely relieved that their “adult in the room” has taken over. After all, Pence may be a fundamentalist zealot, but he is at least an actual “normal” policy-maker.
But a Pence-led response is dangerous, not in spite of, but precisely because he is a typical Republican. His coronavirus task force — which includes several Pence loyalists — is not particularly Trumpian. Its members are long-time political operatives, some of whom even have medical degrees. For the most part, their problem is not incompetence. It’s that they apply their competence and considerable resources in exactly the way a “normal” Republican administration would: protection for the powerful, callousness for the afflicted, and a special disdain for the “other.” In the Pence coronavirus task force, we have a clear window into what a Pence presidency would look like. The answer should scare you.
----- 9 -----
Republicans Tried to Sneak Abortion Restrictions into the Coronavirus Bill
Anti-choice lawmakers are stalling emergency legislation.
by Marie Solis
Mar 13 2020
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4ag55g/republicans-coronavirus-emergency-legislation-abortion-restrictions
As lawmakers neared a deal on a coronavirus rescue package that would include paid sick leave and free virus testing, a few roadblocks emerged. Among them: Republican attempts to wedge anti-choice restrictions into the House's relief bill, turning—if momentarily—a public health crisis into an abortion debate.
The tensions reportedly revolved around the Hyde Amendment, a decades-old provision that blocks federal funds from going to abortion services, preventing millions of low-income Americans on Medicaid from accessing abortion care.
According to conservative media, some top Republicans believed a stipulation in the House bill requiring the government to reimburse private laboratories doing coronavirus testing could effectively overturn the Hyde Amendment by establishing a government funding stream not subject to the restrictions. In response, anti-choice lawmakers insisted on including language in the legislation that would reaffirm the principles of the amendment.
----- 10 -----
U.S. federal response to coronavirus a ‘fiasco,’ says global health expert
Mar 12, 2020
PBS
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/u-s-federal-response-to-coronavirus-a-fiasco-says-global-health-expert
As the novel coronavirus pandemic takes hold in the U.S., some Americans are expressing concerns over how the government is handling the situation, the availability of testing kits and the U.S. response in comparison to that of other countries. Dr. Ashish Jha of the Harvard Global Health Institute joins Judy Woodruff to discuss the “deeply disappointing” U.S. management of the outbreak.
[TRANSCRIPT AT LINK]
----- 11 -----
How testing failures allowed coronavirus to sweep the U.S.
The Trump administration’s decision to forgo a World Health Organization test and create its own had fateful consequences, experts say.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/06/coronavirus-testing-failure-123166
On Saturday Jan. 11 — a month and a half before the first Covid-19 case not linked to travel was diagnosed in the United States — Chinese scientists posted the genome of the mysterious new virus, and within a week virologists in Berlin had produced the first diagnostic test for the disease.
Soon after, researchers in other nations rolled out their own tests, too, sometimes with different genetic targets. By the end of February, the World Health Organization had shipped tests to nearly 60 countries.
The United States was not among them.
Why the United States declined to use the WHO test, even temporarily as a bridge until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could produce its own test, remains a perplexing question and the key to the Trump administration’s failure to provide enough tests to identify the coronavirus infections before they could be passed on, according to POLITICO interviews with dozens of viral-disease experts, former officials and some officials within the administration’s health agencies.
----- 12 -----
A Week at the Epicenter of America’s Coronavirus Crisis
By James Ross Gardner
March 13, 2020
https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/a-week-at-the-epicenter-of-americas-coronavirus-crisis
We stopped touching each other on a Wednesday. Or was it Tuesday? Information came at us so fast—confirmed cases, public-health warnings, deaths—you could swear the days of the week had transposed, their order jumbled like everything else. Certainly by Wednesday the handshakes stopped. Hugs weren’t far behind. Even among longtime friends and family. This would soon happen elsewhere in the country, to a degree, but here in the Seattle area, where by week’s end COVID-19 would kill nearly twenty of us, evading physical contact carried extra urgency. Every avoidance felt like an act of heroism. You told yourself you were saving lives, and you were probably right.
Days earlier, on Saturday, February 29th, we woke to news of the first U.S. death from the virus, a man in his fifties, at a hospital in Kirkland, eight miles northeast of Seattle. At nearby Life Care Center of Kirkland, two patients tested positive. The number of confirmed cases tripled within twenty-four hours. By Monday, five were dead, four of them patients at Life Care in their seventies and eighties. Out came declarations of emergency, from the Seattle mayor, Jenny Durkan, the King County executive Dow Constantine, and Governor Jay Inslee.
We didn’t know it yet, but we were living in a kind of laboratory of the country’s future. We were the first. The first to see bus drivers don face masks; the first to take seriously, citywide, singing “Happy Birthday” twice in a row as we washed our hands. The first to experience a unique kind of isolation. Circumventing handshakes helped avoid spreading disease—the elbow bump won out as the preferred alternative—but it also fostered a sense that none of us should be anywhere near one another. On the bus you chose to stand rather than share a seat with a stranger. You thought about crossing the street when approaching too many other pedestrians on a sidewalk. Officials would eventually advise—then demand—that we avoid large public gatherings. We were still out in the world, but barely of it. Alone together.
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A President Unequal to the Moment
By Susan B. Glasser
March 12, 2020
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/a-president-unequal-to-the-moment
Crises clarify. The bigger the crisis, the more the clarity, which is why the incompetence, dishonesty, and sheer callousness of the Trump Presidency have been clearer in recent days than ever before. As the coronavirus, as of Wednesday an official pandemic, spreads, the lives of Americans depend on the decisions made—or not made, as the case may be—by a President uniquely ill-suited to command in this type of public-health catastrophe. In that sense, the last few weeks may well have been the most clarifying of Donald Trump’s Presidency.
In a prime-time address to the nation on Wednesday night, Trump declared war on the “foreign virus,” blaming first China and then the European Union for spreading it, and insisting that it carried “very, very low risk” for Americans. The starkly militaristic and nationalistic tone of the address sounded scary and ignorant and utterly inadequate at a time when the country is being radically upended, with travel halting, workplaces and schools shuttering, and hospitals bracing for impact. The “foreign virus” will not be contained or shut out by a European travel ban, which the President announced, any more than it was by a China travel ban, which he had previously decreed. It is already here in states across the nation, and experts warn that it could infect millions and kill hundreds of thousands in a worst-case scenario. Trump spoke little about that, beyond a vague nudge to Congress to pass a payroll tax cut and a warning to “elderly Americans” to be “very, very careful” and avoid “nonessential travel.” He failed to explain or even address the shocking lack of testing of Americans—a stark contrast to the response by other countries—and did not warn the public about or advise them on how to handle the difficult days ahead. Even the major measure that he announced, the European travel ban, required immediate clarification and correction from Administration officials who said it did not apply to trade, as Trump indicated in his remarks, or permanent residents. His former homeland-security adviser, Thomas Bossert, immediately panned the ban as a “poor use of time & energy.”
In short, Trump was detached from the unfolding reality of a global crisis that is unlike any in memory. I’ve watched Presidential speeches for a few decades now. I cannot recall one that was less equal to the moment.
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The Trump Presidency Is Over
It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain.
March 13, 2020
Peter Wehner
Contributing writer at The Atlantic and senior fellow at EPPC
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/peter-wehner-trump-presidency-over/607969/
When, in January 2016, I wrote that despite being a lifelong Republican who worked in the previous three GOP administrations, I would never vote for Donald Trump, even though his administration would align much more with my policy views than a Hillary Clinton presidency would, a lot of my Republican friends were befuddled. How could I not vote for a person who checked far more of my policy boxes than his opponent?
What I explained then, and what I have said many times since, is that Trump is fundamentally unfit—intellectually, morally, temperamentally, and psychologically—for office. For me, that is the paramount consideration in electing a president, in part because at some point it’s reasonable to expect that a president will face an unexpected crisis—and at that point, the president’s judgment and discernment, his character and leadership ability, will really matter.
“Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them” is how I put it four years ago. “No major presidential candidate has ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his benightedness.” I added this:
"Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe. The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief should send a chill down the spine of every American."
It took until the second half of Trump’s first term, but the crisis has arrived in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s hard to name a president who has been as overwhelmed by a crisis as the coronavirus has overwhelmed Donald Trump.
...
The president’s misinformation and mendacity about the coronavirus are head-snapping. He claimed that it was contained in America when it was actually spreading. He claimed that we had “shut it down” when we had not. He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t. He claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”; it won’t. He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months; Fauci says it will not be available for a year or more.
Trump falsely blamed the Obama administration for impeding coronavirus testing. He stated that the coronavirus first hit the United States later than it actually did. (He said that it was three weeks prior to the point at which he spoke; the actual figure was twice that.) The president claimed that the number of cases in Italy was getting “much better” when it was getting much worse. And in one of the more stunning statements an American president has ever made, Trump admitted that his preference was to keep a cruise ship off the California coast rather than allowing it to dock, because he wanted to keep the number of reported cases of the coronavirus artificially low.
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Survey: White Evangelicals See Trump As 'Honest' And 'Morally Upstanding'
All Things Considered
March 12, 2020
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/12/815097747/survey-most-evangelicals-see-trump-as-honest-and-morally-upstanding
White evangelicals in the United States, the core of President Donald Trump's political base, have far more positive views of his personal conduct and character than other U.S. adults.
By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, white evangelicals are more likely than other Americans to say the terms "morally upstanding" and "honest" describe Trump at least "fairly well," according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center.
The evangelical assessment does come with some reservations. Only about 15% of white evangelicals, for example, say "morally upstanding" describes Trump "very well," while another 45% say the term applies to Trump "fairly well." Two-thirds of U.S. adults as a whole say that characterization fits him "not too well" or "not at all well."
...
One explanation for white evangelicals' attachment to Trump is that they see him as a political ally. The Pew survey found that 63% of white evangelical Protestants believe their side has been "winning politically" under the Trump presidency. That's a dramatic turnaround from 2016, when less than one in four white evangelicals saw themselves as on the winning side.
The Pew results also show white evangelical Christians as showing support for a version of Judeo-Christian nationalism. More than 90% say they want their president to stand up not only for religious beliefs in general, but for their religious beliefs in particular, including biblical teaching.
