Biden: Trump Gives Americans A False Choice

Donald Trump and much of the GOP is frantic to reopen the U.S. economy in the hope that a return to normal will save their re-election prospects come November.  In doing so, Americans are being offered a false choice: (i) economic recovery combined with rising infections and deaths or (ii) continued economic disaster combined with fewer fatalities.  Some Republicans have insanely suggested that increased deaths among the elderly is an acceptable trade off for a revived economy. In a column in the Washington Post, Joe Biden calls out Trump - and indirectly the GOP - for foisting a false choice on Americans and lays out how and economic reopening could be combined with health safety.  Of course, it requires what the Trump regime has failed to provide: widespread testing to identify those with the virus and preventing them from spreading it to others.  Access to testing remains difficult and shows little sign of improving to the scale needed thanks in no part to an incompetent White House regime.  Here are column highlights:

The coronavirus, to date, has taken the lives of more than 79,000 Americans. One of every 5 U.S. workers has filed for unemployment — with the unemployment rate now the highest since the Great Depression. It is an extraordinary moment — the kind that begs for urgent, steady, empathetic, unifying leadership.

But instead of unifying the country to accelerate our public health response and get economic relief to those who need it, President Trump is reverting to a familiar strategy of deflecting blame and dividing Americans. His goal is as obvious as it is craven: He hopes to split the country into dueling camps, casting Democrats as doomsayers hoping to keep America grounded and Republicans as freedom fighters trying to liberate the economy.

It’s a childish tactic — and a false choice that none of us should fall for.

The truth is that everyone wants America to reopen as soon as possible — claiming otherwise is completely absurd. Governors from both parties are doing their best to make that happen, but their efforts have been slowed and hampered because they haven’t gotten the tools, resources and guidance they need from the federal government to reopen safely and sustainably. That responsibility falls on Trump’s shoulders — but he isn’t up to the task.

It’s been more than two months since Trump claimed that “anybody that wants a test can get a test.” It was a baldfaced lie when he said it, and it still isn’t remotely true. If we’re going to have thriving workplaces, restaurants, stores and parks, we need widespread testing.

In addition to forgetting the tests, he seems to have forgotten that ours is a demand-driven economy — you can shout from the rooftops that we’re open for business, but the economy will not get back to full strength if the number of new cases is still rising or plateauing and people don’t believe that it’s safe to return to normal activities. Without measures in place to prevent the spread of the virus, many Americans won’t want to shop in stores, eat in restaurants or travel; small-business owners know that a nervous public won’t provide enough customers to ensure they thrive.

States and cities that have attempted to reopen are discovering that the economy isn’t a light switch you can simply flip on — people need confidence to make it run, and that confidence must be earned by credible leadership and demonstrable safety.

Again, the solution isn’t a mystery. The Trump administration could focus on producing and distributing adequate testing and protocols that conform with the guidance of public health experts; doing so would speed up the reopening process considerably and make it a whole lot more effective.

If Trump and his team understand how critical testing is to their safety — and they seem to, given their own behavior — why are they insisting that it’s unnecessary for the American people?

And why does the president insist on trying to turn this into yet another line of division, pitting strained, grieving Americans against one another across manufactured battle lines of “health” and “the economy”? Everybody knows that we can’t revive the latter unless we safeguard the former — and pretending otherwise is the most transparent of political ploys.

Trump should be working to get Americans the same necessary protections he has gotten for himself.  It’s the right thing to do, and the only path to truly getting the economy back on track.

Trump’s Coronavirus Response May Be Alienating Older Voters

Several GOP elected officials have outright said that reopening the economy is more important than the deaths that may result in ending stay at home and social distancing orders too soon. These include Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick (a perennial nutcase in my view), Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, and   Louisiana GOP Senator John Kennedy even as polls show more than 60% of Americans fear that efforts to reopen the economy are coming to soon and pose a risk to the lives of Americans.  Joining the ranks of those who place the economy over the lives of American citizens is, of course, Der Trumpenführer who is desperate to restore the economy to (i) enhance his re-election prospects and (ii) cause voters to forget his horrific mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic,  Meanwhile, most at risk from the Covid-19 pandemic are older voters, many of whom tend to be more conservative and vote Republican.  As New York Magazine reports, some of these older Americans may be belatedly waking up to the reality that neither Trump nor the GOP have their best interests at heart.   Here are article excerpts: 

Two of the political data points that currently spell bad news for Donald Trump are steadily worsening public assessments of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and Joe Biden’s strong position among voters over 65, who have leaned Republican in every presidential election since 1996. Since the elderly as a whole are more vulnerable than younger cohorts to a lethal dose of COVID-19 and since Trump at first minimized the threat and later expressed impatience with measures to arrest it, the obvious question is whether the one poll finding has anything to do with the other. Is Trump losing older voters because he seems callous toward their fears?

Morning Consult definitely has evidence that seniors are souring on Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, particularly now that he’s fretting so much over the economy:

By a nearly 6-to-1 margin, people ages 65 and older say it’s more important for the government to address the spread of coro than it is to focunaviruss on economic goals. And as President Donald Trump increasingly signals interest in prioritizing the economy, America’s senior citizens are growing critical of his approach.

In mid-March, this group approved of Trump’s handling of the outbreak at a higher rate than any other age group, with a net approval of +19. A month later, that level of support has dropped 20 points and is now lower than that of any age group other than 18-29-year-olds. 

Similarly, Quinnipiac shows seniors approving of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus by a 48/45 margin in early March but disapproving by a 52/45 margin in early April.

[A]ny way you slice it, Trump is playing with fire in promoting a megastrategy for the pandemic that appears to make the safety of seniors a secondary concern, even as he agitates against allowing the robust voting-by-mail options that might make seniors feel safer in voting. His party needs to win seniors and needs them to vote at their typically high levels. It’s possible Biden’s success in polling of older voters reflects these specific concerns about Trump or simply a tendency to embrace a less erratic and more empathetic leader at a time of maximum insecurity. So long as it persists, though, it is Uncle Joe’s ace in the hole.

Trump’s War on the States

Armed protesters in Michigan - Photo/Paul Sancya.

With each passing day of the Covid-19 pandemic, several things become clear to mentally functioning Americans: (i) the extent of Donald Trump's malignant narcissism, (ii) Trump's ignorance of and contempt for America's constitutional government as he claims all power to himself, and (ii) the ignorance and idiocy of his base which he and provocateurs at Fox News and right wing "news" outlets are protesting against state lock-down orders that are successfully slowing the virus. Tellingly, at many of such protesters, the Trump faithful are showing up waiving their guns thus demonstrating a need to compensate for their infinitesimally small male endowments and equally small brains.  Through it all, Trump rails at state governors who he cannot control and who, under the constitutional system have the power to protect their states even if the result is an economy that will not be helpful to Der Trumpenführer's re-election prospects.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at Trump's unhinged war on the states which hopefully will blow up in his face.  Here are highlights:

After weeks of disappointment with the White House’s pandemic response, a group of governors in the Northeast and one on the West Coast have announced plans to coordinate the reopening of businesses and schools regionally. Could this bring an escape from Trump’s policy shortcomings, or will it simply escalate his attempts to grab power?

Nothing will stop Trump’s attempts to grab power. His novel theory of presidential governance, as he himself has defined it, is to seize “total” authority while bearing no responsibility. He will throw any power move against the wall to see if it sticks. When the coastal coalitions of governors chose to flatly ignore or, in Andrew Cuomo’s case, mock his bid to set himself up as a king, he pivoted in a blink to his dead-on-arrival push to adjourn Congress so he could staff governmental vacancies with a new round of C-list hacks who wouldn’t be subject to Senate approval.

Every day a new tantrum, a new search for scapegoats for his catastrophic mismanagement of America’s public-health catastrophe, and a new attempted end run around the rule of law. The daily Trump show is the most predictable daytime television series since Romper Room.

Yesterday Trump again threatened to use his power to wreak vengeance against states who don’t do his bidding: “If we’re not happy, we’ll take very strong action against a state or a governor … But many governors — and not exclusively those in the coastal coalitions — will refuse to obey Trump’s much-hyped decision to “open” America by May 1. (For the first time, May Day may prove synonymous with Mayday.) Already, some of the Wall Street tycoons he strong-armed into White House conference calls yesterday told him that most Americans won’t return to work without a wholesale testing regimen to assure them their lives are not at risk. Since Trump continues to claim that America now has “the most expansive testing system anywhere,” a desperately needed federal testing initiative will continue not to happen and much of the country will continue not to reopen. But while Trump doesn’t have the power to “close down” states that defy him or to force private businesses to open with a “big bang,” he does have one kind of power — political power. And he will wield it. Not with the goal of defeating the coronavirus — he’s convinced himself that war is won — but with the goal of arousing his base to a red-hot pitch of rage that will guarantee its massive turnout in November. You see it in the internet fever swamps, where Anthony Fauci is a deep state traitor and #FireFauci is a battle cry that Trump retweeted for a reason, despite his subsequent claim that he won’t fire Fauci. You see it in the pronouncements of Republican politicians like the Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, the Indiana congressman Trey Hollingsworth, and the Louisiana senator John Kennedy, who have prioritized a reopened economy over the lives of their constituents. . . . .  And of course you see it on Fox News, where the prime-time lineup is trying to foment this street theater into a national phenomenon, social distancing be damned. “ Where will this lead? There’s no way to predict what will happen on Election Day. But unless you choose to ignore what’s already happening in other nations that lifted restrictions too early, there will be new waves of the virus, including in rural America, among religious congregations that abandon social distancing, and at MAGA venues where Trump hopes to rekindle his rallies. Even now, we are seeing a rise in hot spots in states like Florida, governed by mini-Trumps who were tardy in shutting down as the virus hit — and are, in Trump’s language, “chomping at the bit” to reopen. It’s been clear this week that Trump has hit a new level of berserk since last weekend’s epic Times report documenting in meticulous detail that he squandered at least six weeks to inaction, as the virus cut its lethal swath across America. He even used a coronavirus press briefing to unveil a Goebbels-esque propaganda video (produced at taxpayers’ expense) to try to rewrite that history. Trump has ordered that his own name appear on the Treasury’s stimulus checks, an addition that will likely delay payment for many recipients who need it most. . . . The benefits of this stunt will be short-lived in any case. The Washington Post reports today that the IRS’s first distribution of these payments, by direct deposit, is another major screwup that has affected millions of Americans. Whenever the cash arrives, with or without Trump’s signature, it won’t last long for the struggling recipients. Trump’s refusal to endorse any emergency aid for an already challenged postal system — as of last weekend 19 employees had died, and roughly 1,000 had tested positive or were presumed positive for the virus — could further slow the checks’ arrival . . .

As an added insult, the federal relief program to shore up small businesses that retain their employees has now run out of money altogether.

But like that proverbial rooster who would take credit for the sunrise, Trump can always be counted on to take credit for any good news, even if he had little or nothing to do with it. And to blame everything that goes wrong on someone else. If Americans don’t get their $1,200 promptly, that will be Nancy Pelosi’s fault. The immediate crisis for Trump is that the failures are rapidly outpacing the list of handy scapegoats as this pandemic marches on.