Monday Morning Male Beauty

Governors in Growing Uproar over Trump’s Lagging Coronavirus Response

In November 2016, a majority of voters recognized that Donald Trump was unfit for office - hence Hillary Clinton's 3 million more votes in the popular vote. Now, when the nation faces an unprecedented crisis, Trump's unfitness is on daily display.  His "press conferences" are a stream of lies, boasting and preening, and a failure to show any leadership.  His racist and right wing Christian agenda is not going to save the nation from what it faces and hopefully the members of his base will begin to realize they were played for fools.  As Trump fails to lead and exercise powers that might better coordinate the national response to the COVID-19 crisis, governors, mayors and hospital CEO are being left to fend for themselves. A piece in the Washington Post looks at Trump's massive failure.  Here are highlights:

President Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic sparked uproar and alarm among governors and mayors on Sunday as Trump and his administration’s top advisers continued to make confusing statements about the federal government’s scramble to confront the crisis, including whether he will force private industry to mass produce needed medical items.

As deaths climbed and ahead of a potentially dire week, Trump — who has sought to cast himself as a wartime leader — reacted to criticism that his administration has blundered with a torrent of soaring boasts and searing grievances.

[T]he growing gulf between the White House and officials on the front lines of the pandemic underscored concerns in cities, states and Congress that Trump does not have a coherent or ready plan to mobilize private and public entities to confront a crisis that could soon push the nation’s health-care system to the brink of collapse.

“We’re all building the airplane as we fly it right now,” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said on ABC’s “This Week.” “It would be nice to have a national strategy.”

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Peter T. Gaynor said Sunday the president has not yet invoked the Defense Production Act, which would allow the government to order companies to ramp up the production of ventilators and protective masks, among other products.

Gaynor’s remarks directly contradicted what Trump told reporters on Friday, when he said he had “invoked” the law and “put it into gear” — and were coupled with vague optimism about corporate America’s ability to do what is necessary without being compelled by an executive order.

Major auto companies signaled last week that they are studying the feasibility of making ventilators but made no promises about the pace of production, should it begin. A spokesperson for Ford said, “Ford stands ready to help the administration in any way we can, including the possibility of producing ventilators and other equipment.”

There are many obstacles. Ford, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler — the Big Three automakers — have suspended production at their North American plants through at least the end of March because of the coronavirus and after union leaders sought that pause.

The administration’s sunny outlook about companies’ ability to act was met with sharp disagreement from governors facing mounting illness and deaths from covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

“We need the product now,” Cuomo said at a news conference on Sunday. “We have cries from hospitals around the state. I’ve spoken to governors around the country, and they’re in the same situation.”

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Sunday that there are now 8,000 cases in his city, with 60 deaths. He pleaded with Trump to deploy the military to the nation’s financial capital, home to more than 8 million people.

“April is going to be a lot worse than March, and May could be worse than April,” de Blasio said. “We are very much on our own at this point.”

Many governors and mayors said they feel ill-equipped for the coming storm, particularly the expected deluge of patients at hospitals and health centers.

Pritzker [of Illinois] said on CNN that his state has received about a quarter of the personal protective equipment it has ordered from the federal government.

“I’ve got people working the phones calling across the world, frankly, to get this stuff to Illinois,” Pritzker said, as he worried that states are probably “overpaying” in part because of the lack of decisive action by Trump.

Democrats were not Trump’s lone critics on Sunday. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a centrist Republican, said the Trump administration, through FEMA, “has to take the lead” in securing medical items.

“We are getting some progress. Now, it’s not nearly enough. It’s not fast enough. We’re way behind the curve,” Hogan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” as he detailed how Maryland is scrambling to find supplies without any guarantees from the federal government.

Turmoil at hospitals is challenging governors by the hour. Speaking Sunday on CBS, Richard Pollack, president of the American Hospital Association, said “the most immediate thing we need is personal protective equipment: the masks, the gowns, the goggles, that type of equipment to protect our health-care heroes that are on the front lines. That is what is most essential now. If we don’t protect our health-care workers, the system will completely collapse.”

Former Pentagon officials who handled Defense Production Act policy for Democratic and Republican administrations said the Trump administration has so far made little use of the law.

“All of this should have started months ago, so we are behind,” said Bill Greenwalt, a defense consultant who led acquisition policy in the George W. Bush administration. “On production, I think we will find out that our base is not capable of producing what we need as I expect much of it has been outsourced to China and elsewhere.”

Trump — who will be judged by voters at the polls in eight months — also faced criticism from former vice president Joe Biden, the delegate leader for the Democratic presidential nomination, who issued a statement in response to Gaynor’s interview on CNN.

“Mr. President, stop lying and start acting,” Biden said. “Use the full extent of your authorities, now, to ensure that we are producing all essential goods and delivering them where they need to go.”

This is not a reality TV show.  Lives and the nation's economy are at stake and Trump thinks he's still playing a part on The Apprentice.  Be very, very afraid.

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Dedicated to Robert Jeffress

Scamvangelists Put the Collection Plate Ahead of the Safety of Congrgations

I for one favor taxation of religious organizations except for operations that directly engage in true charitable activities - e.g., feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, tending the sick and housing the homeless.  Other activities, including worship services need to be taxed as other businesses because spreading Bronze Age myths and all too often preaching division are NOT charitable activities. With the coronavirus sweeping the country, a number of pastors - scamvangelists, in my view - are showing that keeping the collection plate full is more important that the safety of their congregants who are ignoring science and fact based recommendations in order to allow themselves to be played and shaken down for money.  Last I heard, here in Virginia Liberty University (any oxymoron since it ties what should be legitimate university level learning to right wing Christianity) is still holding classes since Jerry Falwell, Jr., says the virus alarm is all a hoax to hurt Donald Trump's re-election chances.  Another is pastor Robert Jeffress, a gay hater and Trump sycophant, who held packed church services despite the calls for social distancing last weekend.  A piece in Politico looks at these false "men of god" putting money ahead of lives.  Here are highlights:

Thousands of people streamed through the church lobby and into the pews. Ushers at First Baptist Dallas invited members to the front rows, gesturing to the prime seats still available. Trumpets blared, bright blue and purple lights illuminated the stage, and behind the orchestra pit the 100 or so members of choir—ranging from late teens to late 60s—stood inches apart, ready to sing for the next 30 minutes.

When Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor, walked onto the stage, wearing a dark suit and shiny teal tie, he thanked the musicians.

Jeffress’ sermon that morning, presented in his usual stoic-but-chipper demeanor, was titled “The Road to Armageddon,” and focused largely on biblical stories of God’s punishments.

Aside from a few empty pews in the back of the sanctuary, this seemed like any other Sunday. Except it wasn’t. This was Sunday, March 15. Most of the country was already being reminded to stay at home, to practice social distancing, to flatten the curve of the coronavirus outbreak, which President Donald Trump, the man Jeffress supports at every turn, had just declared a national emergency. Every major sports league had suspended play. The city of Dallas had banned gathering over 500 people and canceled its beloved St. Patrick’s Day parade and party, scheduled for the same weekend. Most ministers, rabbis and imams in North Texas had decided it was safer to share the faith on camera rather than in person. But not Jeffress.

Dr. Shelley Conroy, dean of the Louise Herrington School of Nursing at Baylor University—the same university Jeffress attended in the mid-1970s—tweeted: “We should not be putting our elderly members at risk by encouraging them to come to church right now. We should have complied with the intent of the public health orders to keep everyone socially distant for one week to control the spread of this virulent disease.”

Against all these criticisms, the doomsaying and alarming news on television screens and newspaper headlines, Jeffress remained resolute and unmoving.

For the past five years, he [Jeffress] has been Donald Trump’s most visible, most vocal Evangelical supporter. In addition to leading the 13,000-member megachurch in Dallas, one of the oldest in the country, Jeffress appears regularly on Fox News and Fox Business, excoriating the president’s critics while enthusiastically defending the administration’s policies on everything from child separation at the border to saber rattling on the Korean Peninsula. In the past, he has preached sermons with titles like “Gay Is Not Okay,” he’s called Islam “a false religion based on the teachings of a false prophet,” and he referred to Oprah Winfrey as “a tool of Satan.”

Jeffress told the congregation he was uncertain about what the church would do over the next week. He announced that they would cancel evening service and weekday gatherings. But whether to meet the following Sunday—this Sunday—was still being evaluated.

Early this week, the city of Dallas closed down bars and restaurants, except for to-go orders, and told theaters to close. On Monday, Trump suggested keeping gatherings to 10 people or fewer. Soon the virus was detected in all 50 states, and the number of positive tests and deaths looked like they were mirroring the early growth in Italy, where they’re now seeing more than 600 coronavirus deaths a day.

In contrast, all services in the Catholic Archdiocese of New York - an institution for which money is usually the most important god - cancelled all services last weekend. 

The Nightmare in the White House

While the nation goes into lock down and the economy heads towards a collapse, the malignant narcissist in the White House does what he always does: lies nonstop and throws out boasts to inflate his insatiable ego.  When not lying outright, Trump attacks those in the media trying to get out the truth and accurate information and throws governors - including Republican governors who have previously prostituted themselves to Trump - to their own devices in protecting their citizens. Frank Rich has a column in New York Magazine looks at the ongoing lack of honesty and glaring failed leadership in the White House even as Trump sycophants try to change the subject from the failure of the Trump regime to prepare for the pandemic. Here are column excerpts:

As the coronavirus-related layoffs and medical needs pile up, experts are concluding that a strong federal response is needed. Is the Trump administration capable of rising to the occasion?

The president who is leading this country into battle cares about no one but himself, continues to lie to Americans daily about the most basic imperatives of a public-health catastrophe, and presides over an administration staffed with incompetent, third-tier bootlickers and grifters. And I am not just talking about Mike Pence, Jared Kushner, and Wilbur Ross. There are now three college seniors serving in White House positions, thanks to a new purge of ostensibly disloyal staffers being conducted by Trump’s former body man, the 29-year-old John McEntee, recently installed as director of the Presidential Personnel Office. Trump calls himself a “wartime president,” but his only previous wartime experience was partying during Vietnam, when he was spared military service because of “bone spurs.” Those bone spurs long ago migrated to his brain. If America rises to the occasion, it will be despite him, not because of him. We’re at the point where even if Trump were to start telling the truth, no one except the most mad-dog MAGA-ites would believe him.

Right now the country is waiting for a bomb to drop: that much-predicted turning point when the metastasis of illness and mass death in the U.S. could match the curve we’ve seen in Italy. Trump’s nonstop lies — and those of toadies like Pence — are not just intended to cover up the many failures to prepare for the looming apocalypse (“I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic”), or to blame those failures on China and Obama, or to luxuriate in unearned self-congratulation (“I’d rate it a 10”). What the lies are doing now is throwing gasoline on the gathering fire.

Why does a president cite the Defense Protection Act, which allows him to commandeer industry to produce emergency supplies, while simultaneously telling the states to find much-needed ventilators on their own?

Trump’s answer to that last question was that the federal government is “not a shipping clerk.” He seemed not to understand that it’s ventilators that the nation’s hospitals urgently need, not the postal service. Such is his minimal comprehension of the urgent tasks at hand that Trump’s level of competence doesn’t rise to that of the skipper of the Titanic. The Titanic’s captain may have hit an iceberg, but at least he recognized the scientific reality that icebergs exist.

Up until now Trump’s motives for lying have been to (1) cover up what may prove the most catastrophic failure in the history of the American presidency; (2) to distract the country from the continuing failure in the effort to keep his reelection campaign afloat; (3) to boost the stock market. But another motive is emerging that’s entirely in keeping with the history to date of Trump’s kleptocratic White House: rewarding his family and cronies financially.

Based on his [Jared Kushner] and his father-in-law’s past behavior, we have every reason to believe that entrepreneurs in the Mar-a-Lago circuit, assuming they are not killed off by the virus, will benefit from any bailouts crafted by the White House and Republicans in Congress, starting perhaps with casino entrepreneurs like Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn.

This is in keeping with a president who remains passive as athletes and celebrities mysteriously cut the long line to be tested for the coronavirus. It is in keeping with a Vichy Republican Party where the senators Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler were dumping stocks pre-crash, seemingly exploiting inside information about the coming fiasco for huge personal profit while keeping their own voters in the dark about it. Today Tucker Carlson is receiving some applause for being a rare truth-teller on Fox News because last night he called out Burr in no uncertain terms: “There is no greater moral crime than betraying your country in a time of crisis.”

By now, a number of promises Donald Trump has made directly to the press — universal access to testing, a nationwide medical-screening website, the deployment of hospital ships — have failed to pan out after initially receiving breathless headlines. Should the press change the way it covers Trump’s promises?

The challenge to the press remains what it’s been from the start: How do you challenge a lying president on the facts in real time when he is lying as fast as he can speak? The difference now is that more than ever lives are dependent on Americans getting the truth.

Change is needed, and it will require collaboration of the best brains in the news business to reinvent practices and formats. Even hours after Trump had floated bogus miracle drugs before the public yesterday, at least one network evening news broadcast was teasing the story with a hopeful headline before disemboweling it.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

Stop Broadcasting Trump’s Dangerous Coronavirus Briefings

In this new bizarre world of the Coronavirus, most Americans are trying to get true and accurate information about (i) what is happening and (ii) how to keep themselves and their loved ones safe. Neither of these goals can be achieved by watching Donald Trump's propaganda driven "briefings" which sound more like constant bragging and disinformation campaigns.  More over, they continue to seek to mask how badly the Trump/Pence regime dropped the ball on preparedness for what is now facing the nation - a point made in one Washington Post editorial that argues that a president Hillary Clinton would not have dropped the ball in such a stunning manner.  When a narcissistic president only wants single page briefings and surrounds them self with sycophants it's a disaster waiting and all of us will be paying a price for Trump's incompetence and malfeasance.  Here are column highlights: 

The coronavirus is the most foreseeable disaster in history — and so is President Trump’s inability to rise to the occasion.

There were scattered warnings before Pearl Harbor and 9/11 of what was to come. But nothing like this. My Post colleagues report that throughout January and February, the U.S. intelligence community was warning Trump that the pandemic was going to hit America. “The system was blinking red,” one official said.

But Trump wasn’t paying attention. . . . Because of Trump’s negligence, the United States lost two months of response time — precious days that should have been used to test the population, produce more N95 masks and ventilators, and build new hospital beds. This past week, the Pentagon finally announced that a Navy hospital ship would be heading to New York — but it will take at least two weeks to get ready. Why wasn’t the deployment order given sooner?

Utterly lacking in empathy, Trump is incapable of rallying a shell-shocked nation. . . . . I weep in anger and frustration imagining what might have been if Hillary Clinton — a sane, sensible adult — had won. We couldn’t have avoided the coronavirus, but we could have ameliorated its effects. We could be South Korea (102 deaths) rather than Italy (4,825 deaths and counting).

It was precisely because we were afraid of how Trump would mishandle his weighty responsibilities that some “Never Trump” conservatives supported Clinton in 2016. On May 8, 2016, I wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “There has never been a major party nominee in U.S. history as unqualified for the presidency. The risk of Trump winning, however remote, represents the biggest national security threat that the United States faces today.”

For the past three years, Trump supporters have scoffed at critics, claiming we are out-of-touch, pointy-headed, coastal elitists too focused on Trump’s unconventional way of speaking while ignoring his historic policy achievements — meaning an expanding economy that he inherited from Obama. Perhaps they would like to rethink that argument now that the stock market has given up all of the gains it made under Trump and the unemployment numbers are heading for Great Depression levels?

Now, the damage is compounding and rather than giving true and accurate information Trump is spewing lies and disinformation during daily briefings that do little to calm the public (other than Trump cult followers) and, if anything, mislead the public.  A second Washington Post column argues that broadcasting these sham briefings needs to stop immediately.  Whether the media - which bears a huge responsibility for Trump's election due to its false "equivalency"  obsession.  Here are column excerpts:

More and more each day, President Trump is using his daily briefings as a substitute for the campaign rallies that have been forced into extinction by the spread of the novel coronavirus.

These White House sessions — ostensibly meant to give the public critical and truthful information about this frightening crisis — are in fact working against that end.

Rather, they have become a daily stage for Trump to play his greatest hits to captive audience members. They come in search of life-or-death information, but here’s what they get from him instead:

 ● Self-aggrandizement. When asked how he would grade his response to the crisis, the president said, “I’d rate it a 10.” Absurd on its face, of course, but effective enough as blatant propaganda.

● Media-bashing. When NBC News’s Peter Alexander lobbed him a softball question in Friday’s briefing — “What do you say to Americans who are scared?” — Trump went on a bizarre attack. “I say, you’re a terrible reporter,” the president said, launching into one of his trademark “fake news” rants bashing Alexander’s employer. (Meanwhile, he has also found time during these news briefings to lavish praise on sycophantic pro-Trump media like One America News Network, whose staffer — I can’t call her a reporter — invited him to justify his xenophobic talk of a “Chinese virus” by asking rhetorically if he considers the phrase “Chinese food” racist.)

● Exaggeration and outright lies. Trump has claimed that there are plenty of tests available (there aren’t); that Google is “very quickly” rolling out a nationwide website to help manage coronavirus treatment (the tech giant was blindsided by the premature claim); that the drug chloroquine, approved to treat malaria, is a promising cure for the virus and “we’re going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately.” (It hasn’t been approved for this use, and there is no evidence to demonstrate its effectiveness in fighting the virus.)

Trump is doing harm and spreading misinformation while working for his own partisan political benefit — a naked attempt to portray himself as a wartime president bravely leading the nation through a tumultuous time, the FDR of the 21st century. 

 The press — if it defines its purpose as getting truthful, useful, non-harmful information to the public, as opposed to merely juicing its own ratings and profits — must recognize what is happening and adjust accordingly. (And that, granted, is a very big “if.”)

Business as usual simply doesn’t cut it. Minor accommodations, like fact-checking the president’s statements afterward, don’t go nearly far enough to counter the serious damage this man is doing to the public’s well-being.

Radical change is necessary: The cable networks and other news organizations that are taking the president’s briefings as live feeds should stop doing so.

“There is a very real possibility that in broadcasting these press conferences live or in quickly publishing and blasting out his words in mobile alerts, we are actively misinforming our audience,” Alex Koppelman, managing editor of CNN Business, wrote in an email for the network’s Reliable Sources newsletter.

Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University who wrote on his PressThink blog that the media needs to switch into “emergency mode”for covering Trump and clearly communicate that change to its readers and viewers.

“We are not obliged to assist him in misinforming the American public about the spread of the virus, and what is actually being done by his government,” Rosen wrote.

More Saturday Male Beauty

Call Trump’s News Conferences What They Are: Propaganda

The current situation with COVID-19 is showing examples of amazing leadership among many stet governors and foreign leaders as well as lying and propaganda most obvious in the form of Donald Trump where even his group of experts are forced to correct Trump's lies. Shockingly, Trump's base continues to believe the lies and tout the liar-in-chief as "doing a good job" in the fight against the virus even as he has thrown states and hospital systems to fend for themselves. Being a leader means accepting responsibility and giving accurate information, not dishing a sleazy reality TV spiel. Of course, Trump wants to take no responsibility and his idea of leadership is boasting and saying whatever he believes his knuckle dragging base wants to hear.  Meanwhile, his sycophants prostitute themselves constantly to stay in the good graces of the "glorious leader."    A column in the New York Times looks at the disturbing situation.  Here are excerpts:

In a time of global emergency, we need calm, directness and, above all, hard facts. Only the opposite is on offer from the Trump White House. It is therefore time to call [Trump's] the president’s news conferences for what they are: propaganda.

We may as well be watching newsreels approved by the Soviet Politburo. We’re witnessing the falsification of history in real time. When Donald Trump, under the guise of social distancing, told the White House press corps on Thursday that he ought to get rid of 75 to 80 percent of them — reserving the privilege only for those he liked — it may have been chilling, but it wasn’t surprising. He wants to thin out their ranks until there’s only Pravda in the room.

Sometimes, I stare at Deborah Birx during these briefings and I wonder if she understands that this is the footage historians will be looking at 100 years from now — the president rambling on incoherently, vainly, angrily, deceitfully, while she watches, her face stiff with the strangled horror of a bride enduring an inappropriate toast.

If the public wants factual news briefings, they need to tune in to those who are giving them: Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, whose addresses appear with English subtitles on Deutsche Welle. They should start following the many civic-minded epidemiologists and virologists and contagion experts on Twitter, like Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch and Yale’s Nicholas Christakis, whose threads have been invaluable primers in a time of awful confusion.

These are people with a high tolerance for uncertainty. It’s [Trump's] the president’s incapacity to tolerate it — combined with his bottomless need to self-flatter and preserve his political power — that leads, so often, to his spectacular fits of deception and misdirection.

Only a liar — and a weak man with delusions of competence — would be so unnerved by the facts.

Compare this to Cuomo, who takes questions at his news conferences calmly and systematically — and, more to the point, has a substantive response when asked the same questions about anxiety. He hears it. He relates to it. He says it’s real.

On Friday, Cuomo said something else that was quite striking, as he was issuing his executive order for nonessential workers in New York to stay home, other than to run errands or exercise outside. “If someone wants to blame someone or complain about someone, blame me,” he said. “There is no one else who is responsible for this decision.”
Cuomo is nothing if not politically shrewd. He knows full well how this comment compares to Mr. Trump’s “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

But telling the media that they’re peddling fake news is straight from the playbook of the political gangsters of the last century. So many of Trump’s moves are.

How about Orwellian doublespeak? Ooooooh, check. Trump and his team are continually deploying words and phrases that disguise a reality that suggests the opposite. Vice President Mike Pence talks about a “strong and seamless” partnership with the states, when at the same time Mr. Trump is trolling the states, telling Cuomo to get his own respirators.

Pence speaks relentlessly of a “whole-of-government approach,” when in fact the government is hollowed out — defunded to fight pandemics, denuded of experts — and broken in shards, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sidelined in this fight, and the president’s task force now mutely competing with a shadow group run by the president’s son-in-law.

But most dangerous of all is Trump’s insistence that things are fine, or will be shortly, that they’ll be stronger and better and greater than ever. We don’t have any evidence that this is true, and the president finds any suggestion to the contrary quite rude. When a journalist pointed out to him on Thursday that the economy had all but ground to halt, Trump cut him off.

Here’s the truth: Things might be hard — unfathomably hard — for months, perhaps even north of a year. Anyone who’s reading or listening to other sources of news besides the president knows that. It takes sensitivity and strength and intelligence to speak truthfully to the public about imminent hardship, the prospect of enduring pain.

So I listen to Justin Trudeau, a sci-fi experience, a dispatch from an alternate universe that prioritizes the needs and anxieties of the middle class.

And I listen to Cuomo, who says the same thing. His news conference on Friday was about the practical things, knowing the entire state — country, globe — had just taken a precipitous slide down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with food, shelter and safety now topmost on many people’s minds. No one can evict you for 90 days. We’re getting hospital beds. We’re recruiting doctors and nurses in training to fight this fight, and we’re coaxing medical professionals out of retirement.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty