What Trump Says He Did on the Virus — and What He Actually Did

Lies are being churned out nightly during Der Trumpenführer's "press conferences" which are actually propaganda campaigns aimed in no small part at rewriting the history of what Trump failed to do and how he worsened America's situation and, indeed, likely cost citizens' their lives.  Thus, it is important to not allow this gaslighting to occur and to be mindful of what Trump actually did versus what he now claims he did.  The two are very different things.  A piece in Politico looks at the truth versus the fiction (lies, really) Trump and his apologists are dissemination.   Here are article excerpts:  

President Donald Trump, stung by accusations that he was slow to act on the coronavirus pandemic, has released a long list of key actions the administration took to save lives. But the list, released by his campaign, overstates some of his actions – and leaves out the inactions.

The Centers for Disease Control did distribute tests, as the White House notes. But it omitted that the tests didn’t work – and even when they did get improved, testing capacity lagged way behind the need. It was during these crucial weeks, many public health experts say, that an initial scattering of infections snowballed into deadly hot spots. [Trump] The president highlighted how he sought to get American CDC experts into China, while omitting that he had earlier cut back the U.S. engagement there. He did take action on vaccine development, which arguably helped.

Here’s all the ways [Trump] the president said he took action – coupled with a reality check for what really happened.

TESTING: Trump's TimelineFebruary 6: The CDC began shipping CDC-developed test kits for the 2019 Novel Coronavirus to U.S. and international labs.
February 12: The U.S. shipped test kits for the 2019 novel coronavirus to approximately 30 countries who lacked the necessary reagents and other materials.
February 14: The CDC began working with five labs to conduct “community-based influenza surveillance” to study and detect the spread of coronavirus.
February 29 : The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allowed certified labs to develop and begin testing coronavirus testing kits while reviewing pending applications.

Reality CheckThe CDC admits that the test kits deployed early on in the crisis were deeply flawed, preventing widespread use and hobbling U.S. testing capacity. Two weeks after the initial announcement, just three of the more than 100 public health labs in the U.S. had verified the CDC test for use, according to the Association of Public Health Laboratories.

For more than three weeks, the federal government insisted that only CDC-developed tests could be legally used to identify coronavirus outbreaks. The kits’ failures left states dependent on mailed samples to the CDC’s central lab --which proved to be a major bottleneck, delaying results.

Moreover, the testing flaws delayed deployment of the touted “community-based influenza surveillance,” a potential early warning system for hot spots.

Britta Jewell, an epidemiologist at Imperial College, London, told POLITICO that the lack of early and widespread testing in the U.S. played an important role in the timing of social distancing policies. Her work suggests that implementing the policies two weeks earlier could have reduced coronavirus deaths tenfold. . . . “But it’s very difficult to get the timing right if you don’t know with reasonable confidence where the hot spots are or how many people are infected.”

CHINA MONITORING: Trump's TimelineFebruary 3: The CDC had a team ready to travel to China to obtain critical information on the novel coronavirus, but were in the U.S. awaiting permission to enter by the Chinese government.
February 7: President Trump told reporters that the CDC is working with China on the coronavirus.
February 12: The CDC was prepared to travel to China but had yet to receive permission from the Chinese government.
February 22: A WHO team of international experts arrives in Wuhan, China.

Reality CheckThe document accurately notes that China prevented CDC and WHO experts from assessing the outbreak in early February. But it omits context – cuts to international public health efforts by the Trump administration prior to the pandemic had left a smaller footprint in China.

According to reports by Reuters, the administration eliminated a public health position in Beijing last July that had embedded an American epidemiologist in China’s disease control agency. More broadly, the CDC has cut dozens of China-based positions since Trump took office.

PYBLIC COMMUNICATIONS: Trump's TimelineFebruary 4: President Trump vowed in his State of the Union Address to “take all necessary steps” to protect Americans from the coronavirus.
February 9: The White House Coronavirus Task Force briefed governors from across the nation at the National Governors’ Association Meeting in Washington.
February 24: The Trump Administration sent a letter to Congress requesting at least $2.5 billion to help combat the spread of the coronavirus.
February 26: President Trump discussed coronavirus containment efforts with Indian PM Modi and updated the press on his Administration’s containment efforts in the U.S. during his state visit to India.

Reality CheckWhile technically accurate, the campaign’s descriptions omit the fact that Trump’s public statements throughout February repeatedly downplayed the pandemic.

While the White House Coronavirus Task Force did provide a briefing at the National Governors’ Association meeting, the panel stated that "the risk to the American public remains low at this time,” according to a summary released by HHS. Likewise, during the touted press briefing in India, Trump incorrectly stated that the virus was "very well under control in our country" and claimed the “whole situation will start working out.”

VACCINE PRODUCTION: Trump's TimelineFebruary 11: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) expanded a partnership with Janssen Research & Development to “expedite the development” of a coronavirus vaccine.
February 18: HHS announced it would engage with Sanofi Pasteur in an effort to quickly develop a coronavirus vaccine and to develop treatment for coronavirus infections.

Reality CheckThe vaccine partnerships are moving forward, and public health experts say the federal government’s financial backing could help expedite a vaccine.

But Trump has repeatedly overestimated and overpromised how quickly a vaccine could be deployed. Optimistically, researchers say a vaccine could be ready after a year to 18 months of development and testing. But it would take more time to ramp up production.

Experts say a more immediate need was more production of personal protective equipment for health workers on the front lines. The list makes no mention of actions to accelerate that production until late March.

TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS: Trump's TimelineFebruary 29: The Trump Administration:
- Announced a level 4 travel advisory to areas of Italy and South Korea
- Barred all travel to Iran
- Barred the entry of foreign citizens who visited Iran in the last 14 days
- Announced a level 4 travel advisory to areas of Italy and South Korea - Barred all travel to Iran - Barred the entry of foreign citizens who visited Iran in the last 14 days - Announced a level 4 travel advisory to areas of Italy and South Korea - Barred all travel to Iran - Barred the entry of foreign citizens who visited Iran in the last 14 days

Reality CheckTrump frequently defends his record by pointing to China travel restrictions announced on January 31, a move broadly defended by public health experts despite significant gaps.

Further efforts to contain travel from other countries, once the virus had escaped China and gained footholds throughout Europe and Asia, didn’t come until the end of February. By then, strains of the virus originating in Europe were likely already circulating throughout New York City. Trump issued a comprehensive set of European travel restrictions on March 11. Experts say Iran was likely an early hot spot, although data on the virus’ spread in that country is limited.

While travel restrictions are a widely accepted tool for containing international disease outbreaks, some experts have criticized the focus on foreign travelers – noting that American citizens are no less likely to contract the disease and spread it upon their return.

In contrast, Hong Kong – touted by some public health experts as a model international response – has run random saliva tests and subjected nearly all travelers to mandatory 14-day quarantines with criminal penalties for disobeying.

The bottom line: much more could have been done earlier and on a far greater scale had Trump listened to experts and reports dating back to November and December, 2019.   Trump being Trump, failed to do so.

Trump’s Potemkin Plan of Action and Recovery

As Donald Trump states that some states are not at risk from COVID-19 and lies and claims he never said the pandemic would be over by April, the grim reality is that every state now as cases of those sick with the virus, in just two weeks 10 million Americans have filed for unemployment - expect another big number next week - and Trump has insanely put his grifter and equally dishonest son-in-law in charge of the response to the national emergency.  Thankfully, the majority of the nation's governors are stepping up and leading in the vacuum coming from Washington. D.C.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at Trump's fantasy world that discounts facts, goes against the advice of true experts, and seeks to gas light Americans.  Worse yet, Trump appears to be playing favorites in doling out desperately needed supplies, favoring states with Republican governors while stiffing those lead by Democrats.   Here are column highlights: 

[I]t now appears that the Trump administration may be playing favorites, distributing supplies to political allies and states important for the president’s reelection campaign. How bad will the fallout be?

Because Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and the hacks and grifters around them lie about everything, there’s no way to come up with an empirical answer as to how much such petty politics, let alone the sheer incompetence, complete lack of planning, and rank corruption, are making this nightmare worse. Everything is a ruse. The administration’s promised numbers of coronavirus tests, masks, and ventilators were all fiction. The real mission of the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort that Trump dispatched from Norfolk was to give him a photo op; it sits in New York Harbor idle, having admitted only 20 patients because of bureaucratic barriers. Even the origins of the White House’s estimated death toll of 100,000 to 240,000 are being questioned by the nation’s leading disease forecasters, reports the Washington Post. Remember Trump’s inaugural address, with its dark portents of “American carnage”? Well, that turns out to be the only Trump prophecy that is literally coming true.

The crucial electoral state of Florida — whose mini-Trump of a governor, Ron DeSantis, endangered the entire country by refusing to call off spring break — has all the medical equipment it has asked for. Desperate states like Colorado, Maine, and North Carolina are reduced to begging for help from a federal government with a depleted stockpile. What these three states have in common is that their governors are Democrats.

No matter. We know from Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair that the latest corona czar, Jared Kushner, has declared that “New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” The next number that the Trump administration will be lying about is the inventory of available body bags.

But the catastrophic failure of the Trump White House to mobilize government to procure and distribute medical essentials where needed is just the most visible piece of this Boschian landscape of chaos and horror. Now that Congress has enacted a $2 trillion stimulus package, we’re sure to see the Trump family and its kleptocratic cohort play political and personal favorites with economic relief as well. The Trumps are nothing if not impressive in their ability to help themselves and their fellow grifters to every buck not nailed down. . . . . inquiring minds want to know if the administration scheme to have FEMA bid against states for PPE, thereby driving up prices, was sheer dereliction of duty or a concerted effort to benefit war profiteers in or close to the White House.

In the same vein, this week The Atlantic reported that the nonexistent Google testing website hawked by Dr. Deborah Birx in a White House press briefing was assigned not to Google but to a company whose co-founder is Jared Kushner’s brother. (That company quietly scrapped the project even as American casualties spiked in part for lack of the administration’s promised testing.) The Times now reports that the Trump Organization, among other financial machinations, is leaning on Palm Beach County to waive monthly payments on land it leases for its golf club.

Meanwhile, in what is likely to become a national paradigm of unequal relief efforts to come, ordinary Floridians can’t file for unemployment benefits because of an inadequate system and crashing website, both the work of the state’s previous Republican governor (and current senator), Rick Scott. That calamity is surely a preview of the soon-to-arrive train wreck as the Trump administration fails to deliver on Steven Mnuchin’s promise of a speedy distribution of checks to individual households and loans to small businesses.

At this time of emergency and medical need, it is impossible to know which is inflicting the most damage on a suffering American public: the president and his administration’s complete lack of a plan, the incessant lying to create a Potemkin simulation of action, or the politicization and corruption of the various ad hoc schemes Trump and his lackeys are creating on the fly. Trump has taken to speaking of himself as a “wartime president,” but as I’ve said before, the bone spurs that exempted him from military service have now migrated to his brain.

Everyone knows by now that unless Anthony Fauci is speaking, these daily episodes of Trump reality television, running nearly as long as The Irishman (but less well acted), are founts of misinformation that may be dangerous to your health with digressions for self-aggrandizement, political hit jobs, press bashing, and utter drivel.

Network news organizations have started to cut away from them more and more, as they should. Pointing a camera at a news event is not the same thing as reporting on it. Networks can broadcast any effusions that are newsworthy on slight delay — with immediate fact-checking — and go back to reporting actual news happening elsewhere throughout a nation on the ropes. Those who want the whole unedited feed can turn to Fox News while waiting for the next open-mike night from Jeanine Pirro.

The situation is terrifying as is the fact that Trump's base continues to believe the lies Trump propagates and which Fox News (now facing a consumer fraud lawsuit) amplifies. One can only hope that the 12 Republican lead states with no social distancing orders in place suffer exponential increases in virus cases that will perhaps force the willfully ignorant and brainwashed to at last wake up.

Message to Republicans: You Can’t Gaslight a Virus

Donald Trump and his supporters live in a bizarre alternate universe where facts do not matter and lies are offered as truth.  In right wing politics this has worked to a large extent as Trump denies climate change and invents lies against hi political opponents,  This alternate universe appears poised to crash head on with objective reality as the coronavirus continues to spread in the USA (there are now cases in Virginia, but so far only in Northern Virginia) and the Trump/Pence regime increasingly demonstrates that it is not up to the task of dealing with the outbreak. Meanwhile, the world's stock markets continue to drop and trade and travel become increasingly disrupted. A column in the New York Times looks at the fact that gaslighting the public as Trump has done for so long may have met its match and that Trump himself is now a public health threat.  Here are column highlights:

In the Donald Trump era, Democrats and Republicans generally live with two completely different concepts of reality. Their views of Trump, his competence and character, could hardly be more different.

The Pew Research Center last week released the results of a poll that found that an overwhelming majority of Republicans and independents who lean Republican viewed Trump as intelligent.

But, they are largely alone on that island. Only 19 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents view Trump as intelligent.

Furthermore, 71 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners believe that Trump is honest, even though he has single-handedly provided a jolt of energy and a shield of job security to fact-checkers.

Trump has made more than 16,200 false or misleading claims — a milestone that would have been unthinkable when we first created the Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement he has uttered.”

Trump is a lying machine. It is pathological. It is compulsive. It is unrepentant.

Sixty-two percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents see Trump as morally upstanding. This is a thrice married man whom multiple women have accused of sexual misconduct, and at least one has accused of rape. This is a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women, who was outed for paying off women who claimed to have had extramarital affairs with him, and who has appeared (clothed, thankfully) in at least three soft-core pornographic films.

Again, precious few Democrats and their leaners agreed with this assessment of Trump’s morality.

But, there were a couple of areas of general agreement among Democrats and Republicans, one of which was that overwhelming majorities of both groups viewed Trump as self-centered.

That self-centered sensibility has been on full display since the outbreak of the coronavirus.

Trump sees this budding pandemic through the lens of how it will affect him and his re-election prospects. The fact that the people infected and those fearful of becoming so are real people who desperately need the steady hand of a steady leader is lost on him.

Instead of being the president that the country needs in a time of crisis, he has chosen to employ his worn political strategy: lying. Rather than addressing the issue straightforwardly, he has told lie after lie, and in some cases contradicted the scientists trying to manage this issue.

This has real-world consequences for people’s health and the management of the virus’s spread. As a Reuters/Ipsos poll last week found, “Democrats are about twice as likely as Republicans to say the coronavirus poses an imminent threat to the United States,” and “More Democrats than Republicans say they are taking steps to be prepared, . . . . .

Furthermore, when asked last week if he would consider canceling some of his large political rallies to avoid the risk of spreading the virus, Trump responded, “It doesn’t bother me and it doesn’t bother them at all.”

Trump could be making his most ardent supporters a petri dish of disease.

But in his mind, it’s not really about them, and certainly not about the rest of us. This is about him, only, always.

Whereas his supporters can be lied to and gaslighted, a virus cannot. A virus is going to do what a virus does. Viruses are not thinking and aware. Technically, they’re not even living things. They are like an army of androids, multiplying as they attack and infect living things.

So none of the tricks that Trump has learned and deployed will work against this virus. Only science, honesty, prudence and genuine concern for public safety will work now.

And precisely for those reasons, this virus exposes Trump’s enormous weaknesses as the chief executive officer of this country.

The public needs to be assured that we have a real leader at the helm, but we are being shown that just the opposite is true. The fact that he wants to spin media coverage of the virus as politically motivated, the fact that he keeps lowballing the number of people infected, and the fact that he has said that the virus may miraculously disappear, all show that Trump is as much a public health threat as the virus itself.

One has to wonder how bad the virus' spread must become before some of Trump's mindless followers - and educated Republicans who ought to know better - belatedly realize that they have been played for fools - yet again?

Trump Is Gaslighting Soybean Farmers

Many rural areas, especially in the Mid-West voted for Donald Trump.  Now, thanks to Trump wholly self-created trade war these same rural areas are likely to take an economic beating, particularly as China retaliates for Trump's tariffs and looks to other markets to replace agricultural products previously  purchased from American farmers. Trump is trying to deceive these - in my view fools and/or bigots - who fell for his appeals to racism and xenophobia by trying to pretend that China and other nations commenced the trade war that Trump himself started.  A piece in Slate looks at this gaslighting of what Trump hopes will prove to be the gullible.   Here are excerpts:

American soybean farmers are fretting about becoming a casualty of Donald Trump’s brewing trade war with China, which happens to be their most important export market. Prices for the crop took a dive after tensions between the U.S. and Beijing began to flare up earlier this year, and in June, the People’s Republic finally placed a 25 percent tariff on U.S. soybeans and other agricultural products in retaliation for the White House’s duties on Chinese goods.

[Trump] The president, of course, is trying to absolve himself of all responsibility:  “I am in Brussels, but always thinking about our farmers. Soy beans fell 50% from 2012 to my election. Farmers have done poorly for 15 years. Other countries’ trade barriers and tariffs have been destroying their businesses. I will open...”

I don’t usually like to use the phrase gaslighting, because it’s kind of a cliche at this point, but I’m pretty sure this is gaslighting. Trump is right on the narrow point that prices for soybeans have fallen by around half since 2012. But that really has nothing to do with trade barriers by other countries, as he suggests. Crop prices have plunged because of a worldwide boom in farming production that’s led to a giant commodity glut. Meanwhile, exports have actually been a crucial bright spot for American farmers: Measured by tonnage, the U.S. sells a little under half of its total soybean production overseas, with almost 60 percent of those exports headed to China alone last year.

U.S. soybean exports to China* were already down 22 percent through the first five months of this year, and the great fear among growers is that they could end up permanently losing market share there as buyers there shift to other suppliers, particularly Brazil, while Trump’s trade conflict wears on.

[Trump] The president wants the farm belt to believe he’s coming to its rescue. Somehow, I doubt farmers are going to buy it.

Trump played these voters for fools and karma may be about to catch up with them. 

As Indictments and Arrests Loom, Trump Rants to Distract His Base

As expected, in the wake of reports that special prosecutor Robert Mueller has secured one or more indictments with arrests to begin this coming week, true to form Der Trumpenführer has unleashed a torrent of Twitter ranks seeking to distract his base and fan the flames of disingenuous efforts to create new Clinton scandals.  Trump's big fear is that his abysmal 38% approval rating could totally tank if his base ever comes to realize that they lave been lied to and played for fools from the very beginning of Trump's campaign in 2015.  Expect the lies and conniption fits and efforts to slime everyone from the FBI to Mueller himself, to Clinton to increase exponentially as the indictments and arrests move forward.  Trump's biggest enemy - besides his own malignant narcissism - is the truth about the long trail of financial misconduct by Trump himself, to Price Jared to, of course, Paul Manafort.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at the rising efforts to distract.  Here are excerpts:

On Friday, while prosecutors working for the special counsel, Robert Mueller, obtained their first grand-jury indictments in their investigation of potential collusion by the Trump campaign and Russia, the President of the United States was busy gaslighting. Trump tweeted, of course, that “It is now commonly agreed, after many months of COSTLY looking, that there was NO collusion between Russia and Trump. Was collusion with HC!”

The President was referring to an episode that took place in 2010 whereby the Obama Administration gave a Russian firm permission to buy a Canadian company that had the rights to mine a great deal of uranium in the U.S. . . . . the vast majority of examinations by journalists of the uranium deal have found no sign of wrongdoing. I won’t rehash all the details of the bureaucratic process that led to the deal being approved, but it required the support of multiple government agencies, including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a body not controlled by Hillary Clinton. If you want the full explanation for why this allegation is false, I highly recommend this detailed account from FactCheck.org . . . .

What’s more important is that Trump is once again spreading lies to confuse the public about the Russian attack on American democracy last year. There are some obvious reasons why Trump would make this untruthful claim. The first is political. Trump’s typical response to any allegation of wrongdoing is to accuse his accuser of the same crime. Perhaps the most famous moment of the Presidential debates last year was Trump’s response when Hillary Clinton accused him of being Vladimir Putin’s puppet. “No puppet, no puppet, you’re the puppet,” he muttered into his microphone. He has been trying to make that case ever since.

The time line of Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Putin after the uranium deal is hard to square with Trump’s accusation.

The roots of Putin’s animosity toward Clinton and preference for Trump are clear. Putin, according to the intelligence community, blamed Clinton Clinton for stoking protests against his regime in 2011 after Russian parliamentary elections that were called fraudulent by independent observers. Coming in the wake of the Arab Spring, the protests were more widespread than anything Putin had previously faced. The Russian leader publicly accused Clinton of being behind them, charging at the time, as the Times reported, that she sent “a signal” to “some actors in our country.” The U.S. intelligence report concluded, “Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton because he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012 . . . . Putin also believed that the Panama Papers, which disclosed a global offshore accounting network and implicated close friends of Putin, was secretly directed by the U.S. government.

There is no ambiguity about Russia’s preference in the election, and the only reason it needs to be reiterated is that Trump regularly lies about this basic fact. “We assess the influence campaign aspired to help President-elect Trump’s chances of victory when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to the President-elect,” the joint report by sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies concluded.

The second, related, reason for Trump to make this false allegation is that he needs some Democratic “scandal” for his supporters on the Hill and in the media to feast on as the details of the Mueller probe become more problematic for his Administration. And what is more alarming than Trump’s lies about this issue is his ability to get top Republicans and influential conservative media institutions to rally around the idea that the Clinton uranium deal is the real collusion story Americans should care about.

Of course, Trump’s ability to gaslight the public has its limits. The indictments obtained by Mueller’s staffers are expected to be unsealed—or leak—by Monday. They are not expected to concern the Clintons or uranium.