Big Day with Trump and the Nazis

Every once in awhile Trump lets out his authentic Nazi. That sounds like a lot, but you know, his dad was a Nazi and his ex-wife, long before he was running for president, said he kept Hitler's speeches on his nightstand. 

Think for a minute how important something must be to Trump to get him to read.

Thursday was one of those "do your Nazi self" days for Donald. 

He visited a Ford plant in Michigan. Besides being told to wear a mask, wearing a mask, and then taking off the mask, Trump offered this beauty (video here): 

The company founded by a man named Henry Ford. Good blood lines, good blood lines, if you believe in that stuff, you've got good blood.

There's a lot going on here. First, Henry Ford was a strident anti-Semite, and his companies retooled their German operations to produce military equipment for the Nazis. (So did GM.) Moreover, Trump's dad was all about eugenics, the Nazi-friendly science of which groups had "good genes" and which did not. Trump seems obsessed with genetics. "Good blood lines," he said yesterday.

Over on Israel, you can bet Haaretz picked up the story. So did the Anti-Defamation League, which has a resource page on Henry Ford.

You know who else would have picked up on Trump's reference to Ford? American Nazis and other racists, whose own materials Trump has frequently retweeted.

At the Ford plant, Trump also repeated his lie about having been named Michigan Man of the Year. He's never received such an award. 

Trump also took the time to rage-tweet about FoxNews in his distinctive Nazi-whispering way.

Many will disagree, but @FoxNews is doing nothing to help Republicans, and me, get re-elected on November 3rd. Sure, there are some truly GREAT people on Fox, but you also have some real “garbage” littered all over the network, people like Dummy Juan Williams, Schumerite Chris....

 ....Hahn, Richard Goodstein, Donna Brazile, Niel Cavuto, and many others. They repeat the worst of the Democrat speaking points, and lies. All of the good is totally nullified, and more. Net Result = BAD! CNN & MSDNC are all in for the Do Nothing Democrats! Fox WAS Great!

The first four names, best I can tell, target Jews and African Americans. "Dummy" Juan Williams. "Schumerite" Chris Hahn. I don't know anything about Richard Goodstein, but I have a guess. Note too the Nazi rhetoric of people as "garbage."

If you're missing the Nazi messages, that's on you. The Nazis are not.

(Remarkably, I wrote all this before Joe Biden's "ain't black" comment. It's not mine to speak on behalf of black Americans. As a white American, I think Biden's comment is regrettable. In any case, this column isn't an attempt to exempt Biden from criticism that's due him.)

Christian Nationalism: Grifting Vehicle

The news keeps piling up on Rapture believer Mike Pompeo. Dude just axed his department's inspector general for investigating his own misdeeds, including using federal employees to run his personal errands. Now Slate reports that Pompeo's wife, who has already used government functions to build her contact database, had diplomatic security officials literally help move her mother's things to a retirement home.

Thus, Slate: 

Linick [the IG] was looking into two issues brought to his attention by several employees. First, Pompeo and his wife, Susan, were using State Department political appointees for personal household tasks—having them pick up dry cleaning, walk their dog, buy groceries, and so forth. The couple have apparently made these demands quite a lot. A friend of the family told me that when Susan Pompeo visited her mother in Lafayette, Louisiana, security officials were ordered to pick her up at the airport. Last June, they were told to pack up the house in Lafayette and cart away boxes when her mother prepared to move to a retirement home in Overland Park, Kansas.

The second issue under investigation is that, last year, Pompeo illegally declared an “emergency” to circumvent a congressional ban on sending weapons to Saudi Arabia, which would use them for the war in Yemen—although, as was later discovered, there was no real emergency.

And:

A friend of the family told me that when Susan Pompeo visited her mother in Lafayette, Louisiana, security officials were ordered to pick her up at the airport. Last June, they were told to pack up the house in Lafayette and cart away boxes when her mother prepared to move to a retirement home in Overland Park, Kansas.

If we think it's just one guy, let's think some more about the super Christians in Trump's orbit: Betsy DeVos and her brother Erik Prince. But think especially of Christian Taliban cabinet members Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke, whose multiple instances of corruption forced their resignations. The corruption in the administration is pervasive (link strongly recommended), but it's especially interesting when it involves the Christians. 

It's easy to think of Christian nationalism as a grassroots movement, fueled by millions of Americans who have a vision, however distorted, of how America used to be and what it is now. Those people exist, and the movement couldn't persist without them. But every mass gathering, every email blitz, every voter guide, and every position taken is funded by super-rich people who want nothing other than to get super-richer. 

I'm currently reading journalist Katherine Stewart's The Power Worshipers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Christian Nationalism. As Stewart puts it (all references from here on out are from this work):

The Christian nationalist movement is not a grassroots movement. Understanding its appeal to a broad mass of American voters is necessary in explaining its strength but is not sufficient in explaining the movement's direction. It is a means through which a small group of people--quite a few of them residing in the Washington, D.C., area--harness the passions, resentments, and insecurities of a large and diverse population in their own quest for power.

For example, the Family Research Council--who funds them?--promotes some pretty wacky stuff.

Scripture... opposes public assistance to the poor as a matter of principle--unless the money passes through church coffers. (16)

The Bible--the Bible!--also opposes environmentalism and gun control. Just try to swallow how anyone who wasn't exploiting Christianity for their own gain could come up with that. But that's where this agenda goes, and it's a very dangerous space for democracy.

One clear reminder of how this grim system works involves the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby and founders of the Museum of the Bible. Hobby Lobby, of course, challenged the Affordable Care Act's requirement that health care plans include birth control. I'm guessing Green family members, married only of course, use birth control. But there's also the nasty little thing that the Museum of the Bible keeps getting caught with illegal or unprovenanced antiquities. The Museum of the Bible is nothing if not a vehicle for promoting Christian nationalism. In the news this very week. It's a reminder that for these people, integrity means nothing in comparison to promoting the movement that funnels money to themselves.

Expect Cheating: Big Cheating

Don't count your chickens before they hatch, my grandparents used to insist, and they were right. But we're seeing signs of a massive movement away from Donald Trump in the 2020 election. 

We're seeing some weird stuff. Golfer Rory McIlroy says that, given Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, he'll never play golf with Trump again. And the Lancet, the prestigious medical journal published in the US, the UK, and India, says it's time for Americans to get rid of Trump.

Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.

The Lancet also directly called out Trump for lying about the World Health Organization's response to the coronavirus outbreak. Your can read the brief statement here. You could make too much of issue, but let's put it this way:

Suppose Barack Obama had criticized a major international organization on demonstrably false pretenses. How would people have reacted?

 

Well, that's different. But seriously, Republicans are doing what they always do when things are tough: trying to suppress the vote. They're investing heavily in it because they know that the more people vote, the worse their chances get. The only way to beat them, Paul Waldman says, is to keep talking about it, keep being outraged that they seriously don't want people to vote, and--as it happened in Wisconsin--just turn out in overwhelming numbers. 

 

A Blizzard of (Illegal) Poo

We already had our wipers on, but no way we were prepared for this shitstorm. As always, drive carefully, but remember: there's always a crime behind the poo.

Eyes on the prize: where's the crime? We have two pretty big ones going on at the same time: another removal of an inspector general to cover up wrongdoing, and--again--the misuse of government resources to promote massive disinformation.

Donald Trump has just fired another inspector general, this time State Department IG Steve Linick. That makes four IGs in just six weeks, an unprecedented attack on government accountability. Eventually it came out Linick was axed at the request of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, presumably because Linick was investigating Pompeo's misuse of State Department staff. Did Pompeo

made a staffer walk his dog, pick up his dry cleaning and make dinner reservations for Pompeo and his wife, among other personal errands, according to two congressional officials assigned to different committees?

What is it with Trump appointees misusing government resources to make their own lives more luxurious? 

But House Foreign Affairs chair Eliot Engel says there's a bigger reason.

I have learned that there may be another reason for Mr. Linick's firing. His office was investigating—at my request—Trump's phony declaration of an emergency so he could send weapons to Saudi Arabia. We don't have the full picture yet, but it's troubling that Secretary Pompeo wanted Mr. Linick pushed out before this work could be completed. 

So this is how it works. Trumpsters know that, when they're busted for shitting the ethical bed, they need only fire a signal flare, and Donald will clean up their poo. Inspectors General are there precisely to keep this stuff from happening. 

Shit gets deeper. Daily Beast reporters have uncovered a deeply troubling scheme. Congress has received a report from Department of Defense contractors, attesting that the coronavirus indeed emerged from a Wuhan lab. Before I say more, let's be clear: the Daily Beast reporters have revealed the report to be bullshit. Its key pieces of "evidence" don't hold up.

To set the scene, Trump is desperate to blame someone else for the coronavirus. The US has less than 5 percent of the world's population but 28 percent of the pandemic's deaths. So Trump targets everybody else. His favorite target is a research lab in Wuhan, the city where the virus originated. But the genetic evidence strongly rules out a laboratory origin for the virus.

No problem for Trump. If he wants evidence, he'll go to WikiLinks. Or Russia. Or the Ukraine. He's asked for it from China. Now it's a defense contractor. The report came out days after Pompeo said there was "enormous evidence" the virus came from the lab; now he says, "We know it began in Wuhan, but we don't know from where or from whom."

I shit you not. Remember: the New York Times had already reported Trump was pressuring government agencies to cook up evidence on this horseshit story. You could scarcely imagine a greater corruption of government than this.

Thus the blizzard of poo. Whenever Trump's in trouble, the poo flies fast and thick. But the shamelessness, piling on after the Obamagate scam, is reaching new depths.

Over the weekend Eric Trump trotted out the theory that Democrats were spreading the coronavirus to get Biden elected. The virus is protecting Biden from saying something stupid in public (okay, 5 points for Slytherin there), and it's keeping Trump from holding rallies. No question, the pandemic is hurting Trump in lots of ways. Then little Eric abandoned the reality tent.

You watch, they'll milk it every single day between now and Nov. 3. And guess what, after Nov. 3, coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen.

I'm telling you, they'll say anything. And they're happy to wallow in poo. They literally don't care. Here's Trump advisor Peter Navarro talking with ABC's George Stephanopoulos:

NAVARRO: Yeah, well Joe Biden's has got 40 years of sucking up to the Chinese, including the eight years as vice president. And we know about the billion dollars that his son took from the Chinese.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That's just not factual, sir. That is not a fact. He did not take a billion dollars from the Chinese.

NAVARRO: Went into that hedge fund.

Be that as it may, I do think this election is going to be a referendum in many ways on China.

"Be that as it may." Put that in your pipe and smoke it. 

No, wait. Don't smoke poo. It's not healthy. 

Evangelical Misbelief

Disinformation works. In a recent interview with Sam Harris, Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, explained that experts can mine our electronic data and, with the help of artificial intelligence, understand us better than we understand ourselves.

So how does that work with Trump supporters? Why do they believe Trump himself, or misinformation that favors him, over other sources of information? And what about white evangelicals, Trump's more steadfast supporters?

A recent Pew study, reported in Christianity Today, shows that white evangelicals assess their coronavirus news in ways directly opposed to the rest of us. While few members of the general public trust Trump to tell the truth, white evangelicals trust Trump above all other sources.

Moreover, "Around two-thirds of white evangelicals said the news media had greatly or slightly exaggerated the risks posed by COVID-19."

I have some thoughts about that. First, the evangelical movement is historically entangled with resistance to critical biblical scholarship and evolutionary science. Simply, many evangelicals have been trained to regard mainstream expertise--like climate change--as fake news. This segment of the population judges information according to its alignment with their worldview, and they have a long history of doing so.

Case in point: the Museum of the Bible.

But there's a second factor. I've been reading sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry. Their recent book Taking America Back for God demonstrates the links among white Christian nationalism, support for Donald Trump, and--well, let's say it, xenophobia. Factor out all the variables, and racism animates Trump's evangelical supporters more than any other single factor. 

Along with Joseph O. Baker, Perry and Whitehead have a brand new article in the prestigious journal, Sociology of Religion. Here's how Perry summarizes the piece: "We show #ChristianNationalism still predicts intent to vote Trump in 2020, but it's become even more racialized & connected to fear of ethnoracial outsiders." In other words, white Christian nationalist sentiment is growing even more racist and xenophobic.

I'll share the abstract here, emphasizing key items in bold.

Some of the strongest predictors of voting for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election were Christian nationalism and antipathy toward Muslims and immigrants. We examine the interrelated influence of these three factors on Americans’ intentions to vote for Trump in 2020. Consistent with previous research, Christian nationalism and Islamophobia remained strong and significant predictors of intention to vote for Trump; however, the effect of xenophobia was stronger. Further, xenophobia and Islamophobia significantly and substantially mediated the effects of Christian nationalism. Consequently, though Christian nationalism remains theoretically and empirically distinct as a cultural framework, its influence on intending to vote for Trump in 2020 is intimately connected to fears about ethnoracial outsiders. In the penultimate year before Trump’s reelection campaign, the strongest predictors of supporting Trump, in order of magnitude, were political party, xenophobia, identifying as African American (negative), political ideology, Christian nationalism, and Islamophobia.

I'll leave it to you to parse the difference between racism and xenophobia. Let's just say they're related. 

Thus, we should be alert to the ways in which Trump and his supporters promote disinformation. The Daily Beast has just reported that Trump and his administration are pressuring CDC officials to downgrade coronavirus death counts. 

I've seen this disinformation out there on social media: friends posting goofy sources that say the death count is too high because hospitals make more money by attributing deaths to the pandemic. These friends have no idea where the information comes from--I had to dig it up--but it says what they're predisposed to believe, namely that Trump is getting a bad rap. (Just this week Anthony Fauci testified that we have a likely undercount.) 

Far as I can tell, it's the white evangelicals who are most likely to fall for it. Prone to circle their cultural wagons, they trust information by loyalty more than the rest of us do.

"The Power to Protect the Guilty"

We're watching as William Barr and Donald Trump turn the Department of Justice into David Frum on Twitter: 

"The main benefit of controlling a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.”

Maybe we should have guessed it, but I mean, "Who would have guessed it?" Today Donald Trump jumped the final shark, saying Barack Obama and Joe Biden should be in jail, serving 50 year sentences. 

If I were a Democrat instead of a Republican, I think everybody would’ve been in jail a long time ago, and I’m talking with 50-year sentences. People should be going to jail for this stuff ... this was all Obama. This was all Biden.” 

Obamagate! Trump won't tell us what it is exactly, but apparently it has to do with Joe Biden knowing that the FBI was looking into Michael Flynn, Trump's future National Security Advisor, as a national security threat. Flynn was "unmasked," meaning that his identity became known beyond the tight circle of people investigating him. Someone leaked to the Washington Post.

Never mind that Flynn plead guilty to lying to the FBI, a sweet deal because he'd actually worked as a paid agent for Turkey without filing the required paperwork. He'd also been on the payroll of Russia Today, a Putin propaganda outlet. So maybe the FBI would be interested about a guy with those connections who was lying to the future vice-president about his conversations with Russia? 

Never mind, too, that the NSA receives tens of thousands of unmasking requests every year, more in the Trump administration than under Obama. 

According to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, there were 9,217 unmasking requests between September 2015 and August 2016 - the latter days of the Obama administration. The number of such requests has risen during the Trump administration. There were 9,529 requests in 2017, 16,721 in 2018 and 10,012 last year.

And remember, no White House official could have known the FBI was talking about Flynn, who was masked, until after he was unmasked. Flynn literally could not have been targeted.

Here's a helpful summary of the facts. 

When you can free the guilty and prosecute the innocent, democracy is approaching its end state. 

For example, we all know Donald Trump hate Amazon because its owner, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington Post. So Missouri Senator Josh Hawley is calling to investigate Amazon for antitrust violations. 

And we all remember the fiasco in which Republican senators Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler, and maybe California senator Dianne Feinstein, came under suspicion for selling securities just before the pandemic tanked financial markets. Trump hates Burr because Burr maintains that, yes, Russia did meddle in the 2016 election in Trump's favor. But Trump loves him some Kelly Loeffler. Well, the FBI has visited Burr, who has stepped down as chair of Senate Intelligence. They've visited Feinstein. But there's no indication they've visited Loeffler. 

What do you think of David Frum now?

Maybe it's all a smokescreen to cover for Trump's failure to address the coronavirus threat decisively. He still says testing is overrated. And today whistleblower Dr. Rick Bright told Congress how badly the Trump administration handled things and how dangerous this fall could be if we don't get on the ball.

But if it's a smokescreen, it's a very dangerous smokescreen. An arrow aimed straight at the heart of democracy, the rule of law.

In other news, we see the right wing pressuring swing state governors to open their states, with no particular plan to mitigate the risks. PA State Senator Scott Martin is part of that crowds, but his brother has called out the hypocrisy. Just for fun, check this out.

Tantrum & Threat

Put two things together: Today Dr. Anthony Fauci is telling Congress that premature opening of states will lead to "needless suffering and death." And yesterday Donald Trump threw a tantrum on Twitter and for the press. 

These two things go together. Trump has utterly failed to protect us from the coronavirus pandemic, and he has no plan to turn things around, so he stirs up as many distractions as possible. Now national Republicans are following suit.

Yesterday Trump engaged a Twitter rant about "Obamagate." Someone leaked Obama's phone comments about Trump's leadership, and Donald just couldn't stand it. He didn't say what Obamagate was exactly, but it appears he's back to accusing Obama of undermining his presidential campaign.

New York Magazine

During his press briefing Trump was asked to explain Obamagate. He didn't. Of course he didn't. Full excerpt.

Rucker: In one of your Mother’s Day tweets, you appeared to accuse President Obama of ‘the biggest political crime in American history, by far’ — those were your words. What crime exactly are you accusing President Obama of committing, and do you believe the Justice Department should prosecute him?

Trump: Obamagate. It’s been going on for a long time. It’s been going on from before I even got elected, and it’s a disgrace that it happened, and if you look at what’s gone on, and if you look at now, all this information that’s being released — and from what I understand, that’s only the beginning — some terrible things happened, and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again. And you’ll be seeing what’s going on over the next, over the coming weeks but I, and I wish you’d write honestly about it but unfortunately you choose not to do so.

Rucker: What is the crime exactly that you’re accusing him of.

Trump: You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.

For what it's worth, Senate Republicans were unwilling to back up Trump's allegations, whatever they are. So far, no evidence has turned up to support them. (Of course.)

 

Trump's meltdown continued--but is it a meltdown when it serves to distract from his real failures? CBS News reporter Weijia Jiang asked Trump to explain his false claims that the US is "doing far better than any other country when it comes to testing"--a direct confrontation with his public lying.

Trump told Jiang to "ask China." Not exactly an answer to Jaing's question. So Jiang, who was born in China, pressed: "Why are you saying that to me specifically?" Trump immediately ended the briefing and stalked offstage.

(He did actually stalk.)

In the midst of all this distraction, something bigger and more sinister is going on. Republican politicians in Pennsylvania announced an initiative to defy the governor's orders and open certain PA counties ahead of the schedule. Like Republicans all over the country, they're doing so without supporting without supporting metrics. 

The local paper here in Lancaster, hardly a liberal rag, launched a scorching editorial this morning: Questions for GOP leaders. Governor Tom Wolf and local mayors pushed back hard.

What's become clear: National Republicans are targeting Democratic governors in 2016 swing states with irrational pressure campaigns, and Trump is supporting them. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and  Minnesota. It's an attempt to force governors into costly political mistakes, peeling away voters who have been turned off by Trump's ridiculous attempts to cover up his own failure.

A couple of other nuggets. One reason Trump went haywire is Sunday evening's 60 Minutes report on a disinformation campaign spawned by Trump and his allies. Trump blamed the Obama administration for supporting a lab in Wuhan, when in fact (a) the money didn't go to the lab and (b) the funds were so important for pandemic protection that Trump increased them recently. Oh.

And I invite you to take historian John Fea's 15 history exam questions on Trump's inauguration promises.

Testing: Don't Hold Your Breath

Does Donald Trump believe in anything? Maybe self-aggrandizement. Maybe nationalist populism. Maybe white supremacy. I dunno. But now we know: he doesn't believe in testing, or masks, or vaccines.

Yesterday was a bad day for testing with Trump. We learned that Katie Miller, press secretary to Mike Pence and spouse of administration ghoul Stephen Miller, tested positive for the coronavirus. That makes at least 13 White House personnel, including 11 Secret Service agents and a military valet, who have tested positive. Asked about Miller, Trump offered this nugget of wisdom.

Katie, she tested very good for a long period of time and then all of the sudden today she tested positive... This is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great.

It's almost like he holds the person accountable for the test, as if Miller was batting .370 but fell into a little slump. 

The stupidity is willful. It's hard to tell whether it's intentional or not, but it's willful. The one thing we need in order to restore some semblance or normalcy and economic recovery is to know where the virus is thriving. We won't get that with Trump, who has already said testing makes us look bad. 

It was a bad day for vaccines too. Our great leader again:

I feel about vaccines like I feel about tests. This is going to go away without a vaccine, it's gonna go away, and we're not going to see it again, hopefully, after a period of time. You may have some flare-ups.

Also bad for masks. It's willful stupidity that leads Trump to visit with World War II vets sans mask. Let's repeat that: with WWII vets. Here's his logic, per the Daily Beast story:

[H]e was “very far away from them” and “they’re so pure, it will never happen.” “I would have loved to have gone up and hugged them because they are great. I had a conversation with everyone, but we were very far away. You saw,” Trump said during a meeting with GOP members of Congress. “Plus the wind was blowing so hard in such a direction that if the plague ever reached them, I’d be very surprised.”

These elderly heroes are "so pure" they can't get sick and die. Y'all.

But wait for it. Asked about the mask-free zone for elderly vets, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said, “They made the choice to come here.”

Washington Post reporter James Hohmann reveals the fundamental hypocrisy surrounding masks in the Trump camp.

Brad Parscale brought 5 prototype masks featuring the Trump reelection logo to a Thursday mtg with POTUS. Trump was delighted & approved a mask for public sale. Parscale tweeted a pic of himself wearing it. This was the only time anyone involved in the meeting wore any covering.

Masks for sale! Only we don't wear them. 

No testing. No vaccine. No masks. No good. And no protest from elected Republicans.

What do Republicans care about? Welp, they're sinking $20 million in an effort to fight voting rights lawsuits.

Testing, Not Testing

By all accounts a safe return to business requires widespread testing and contact tracing. Donald Trump wants the opening, but he doesn't want to help with the testing. What are we to make of that?

Trump has been claiming that the United States has done more testing than any "all other countries combined." He's also promised that everyone who wanted to be tested could be tested when that wasn't true. These are flat-out lies, as have been his promised numbers of tests he never delivered. But Wednesday he said,

In a way, by doing all this testing we make ourselves look bad.

It throws us all the way back to people were stranded on a cruise ship, and Trump didn't want them to come ashore because it would throw off the numbers.

Bottom line: Donald Trump is not going to help with the testing. He shows no signs of caring how many Americans die from this virus, only how bad it makes him look.

From the New York Times article linked above.

The White Flag of Victory

UPDATE: I suppose in response to popular outcry, Trump now says the task force will continue indefinitely. That doesn't mean they'll be allowed to do anything, but it does require updating.

Donald Trump is good at some things. One of them involves declaring victory in the midst of disaster. Now the Trump administration is winding down its coronavirus task force.

The New York Times:

Despite growing evidence that the pandemic is still raging, administration officials said on Tuesday that they had made so much progress in bringing it under control that they planned to wind down the coronavirus task force in the coming weeks and focus the White House on restarting the economy.

This is what we call raising the white flag of victory. "It really is all a reflection of the tremendous progress we’ve made as a country," says Mike Pence. Uh-huh.

But none of the pieces fit. Take away New York and coronavirus cases are on the rise, but we're loosening the very policies that have kept the virus from going hog wild. We're losing something like 1700 people a day and a leaked Trump administration study expects that number to rise to 3000 by the end of the month. Among the dire predictions that emerged at the beginning of the crisis, Trump chose the lowest death estimate, about 60,000, and declared that losing 100,000 or so Americans would be a success. We'll be at that number by the end of the month, precisely when Trump aims to shut down.

I've seen people compare the dissolution of the task force to George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" fiasco during the Second Iraq War. They're not the same. Bush actually thought victory was in hand. The Trump administration knows we're in a world of hurt and insists upon denying it.

The misfit between giving up the fight and simultaneously declaring victory leads me to think Trump isn't fighting the virus at all. He never has been. Donald Trump never intended to govern the United States, only to exploit that nation for his own power and wealth.

That's a crazy thing to think. It troubles me to harbor the thought. But there are powerful reasons for drawing this conclusion.

First, we've never had any serious effort to resource the fight against the virus. On the contrary, Trump has insisted it's up to the states, who are then forced to fight one another for needed supplies, resulting in greater costs and fewer resources. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have reported that Jared Kushner appointed "inexperienced volunteers" to procure supplies. Among other dysfunctions, the volunteers prioritized suggestions from "VIPs"--like Fox personalities--over the work of experts. The reporting is based on a whistleblower memo in addition to interviews with involved parties.

Second, we've got governors hiding their acquisitions of necessary supplies so that Trump won't "appropriate" them.

Third, Trump's own experts, like Anthony Fauci, say there's very little chance the virus came from a Chinese lab, but Trump and his cronies continue pushing the theory, wasting national intelligence sources in the effort.

Fourth, we've got Cabinet officials disregarding the task force's advice to stay home by recommending that people get up and start traveling again. What a great time to see the country!

Finally, Rick Bright, removed from his post as the nation's top vaccine expert, has filed a whistleblower complaint. Bright says, "I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit."

This is no serious way to fight a pandemic. It's not even the good ole college try. Trump never tries actually to govern, only to consolidate power. How else do we assess the nomination of a Director of National Intelligence who has no personal experience in the field and who follows multiple conspiracy theorist and QAnon accounts on Twitter? What kind of judgment does that reflect?

Author Jared Yates Sexton concludes,

Whistleblowers and stories have shown that Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner have not only wrangled life-saving supplies from states and bungled the response, but that the process was so rife with corruption and ineptness that it’s caused lives. Now, both are congratulating themselves for a job well done and continually saying the crisis is behind us.

It's time we admitted that Trump isn't trying to help anyone but himself.

The Stupid and the Scary

So Donald Trump is speaking to the graduating class at West Point. Which means they have to fly in over 1000 cadets, plus necessary others, after everyone had gone home. Good for the cadets, who get to see each other at graduation! But this really amounts to a very expensive excuse for Trump to get out of the White House and onto a stage. It's stupid, but it's also corrupt as hell.

Trump's Sunday night comments:

There’s no risk. They wanted me to speak. The generals asked me to please do it. I didn’t want to speak. It’s my honor to speak. I said I want their families to be there.

The generals asked him??? 

Politco

Then there's Secretary of State Propaganda Mike Pompeo, swearing by all that's holy that "there's enormous evidence" that the coronavirus escaped from a Wuhan lab and not from natural processes in a market. 

It has to be said really loud. This is bullshit. There's a small chance it might be true, as in there's a small chance that Hitler escaped to Argentina, but it's bullshit because there's no "enormous" evidence. Most experts don't think it's true. The New York Times, reporting not opinionizing:

Senior American officials, including those who have looked at intelligence and who favor the lab theory, have said in private that evidence pointing to a lab accident is mainly circumstantial and based on public material. Intelligence officers have told senior administration officials that they probably will not find proof of a lab accident. And among scientists and especially virologists, there is largely agreement that the chances that a lab accident sparked the outbreak are slim, while the probability that the new virus made the leap from an animal to a human in a nonlab setting in southern China is much higher.

And it's dangerous bullshit. It's about China, who is beginning to push back. And it's a distraction from the most important thing: actually doing something to help.

Which is what Trump absolutely isn't interested in.

More distraction. Which is true?

• The virus is all under control? (Trump's first story.) 
• Trump acted very strongly on the pandemic right from the top? (Story #2)
• It's not really Trump's fault he failed to act strongly because the intelligence agencies didn't alert him to the seriousness of the threat. That's the new story.

Here's what Trump tweeted Sunday: The intel reports....

Intelligence has just reported to me that I was correct, and that they did NOT bring up the CoronaVirus subject matter until late into January, just prior to my banning China from the U.S. Also, they only spoke of the Virus in a very non-threatening, or matter of fact, manner...

That's one hell of a lie. Trump got his first briefing January 3, and intel agencies were reporting up beginning in November. This has been widely reported by leading news agencies. He's bullshitting, just like Pompeo is bullshitting.

But it's all fog with Trump. What he doesn't want us to see is that, even when he had the information, he routinely minimized the threat until he finally couldn't.

I admit this is a distraction, but one more vignette from the world of Trumpish clownfoolery. Dr. Jerome Corsi almost wound up in prison because of his dalliances with Roger Stone and Wikilinks. Well, Corsi meant to contact a friend about hydrochrloroquine...

--wait, Corsi is a medical doctor?--

he accidentally sent the email to the very Mueller team prosecutor who'd been on his ass a couple of years ago. Now there's a federal investigation of Dr. Vladimir “Zev” Zelenko, hydrochloroquine quack.

Before we sign off, let's get real. Last night Trump revised his US death estimate from zero (wait, that was late February) to 60,000 (wait, that was last month) to 100,000. The thing is, Trump is taking credit for that--saying it's at the low end of the range of possibilities.

Meanwhile, Trump supporters are mocking earlier predictions of 1-2 million US deaths.

Here's the thing. On March 11--before states and municipalities took strong action, here's what Dr. Anthony Fauci said. Before I offer the quote, remember that once he said this, Fauci was rapidly ulled out of the hearing for "another meeting" nobody knew about--and remember, Trump still doesn't want Fauci testifying before Congress.

If we are complacent and don’t do really aggressive containment and mitigation, the number could go way up and be involved in many, many millions. If we contain we could flatten it.

Many, many millions.

As late as March 11, Trump was still trying to control the damage. Even if he didn't hear about the threat until late January, a lie, that still doesn't excuse his conduct.

Trump is playing with American lives, about which he really doesn't give a damn. Last week he said he wouldn't support relief efforts in blue states without getting something in return, and this week he's saying he won't release relief unless sanctuary cities change their policies.

The last thing that would cross his mind? Just saving American lives.