May 1, 2020

For Some Reluctant Trump Voters, Coronavirus Was The Last Straw

For Some Reluctant Trump Voters, Coronavirus Was The Last Straw
By Charlotte Alter and Tessa Berenson
April 30, 2020 3:54 PM EDT


Heidi and Dennis Hodges were proud to vote for President Donald Trump in 2016. “I liked his tough stance. I liked that he wasn’t a politician,” says Dennis, who runs a window-tinting company in Erie, Penn. “I supported him for three and a half years,” says Heidi, who manages the office of an auto service shop.

Then came the coronavirus crisis. For Dennis, the last straw was seeing Trump downplay the seriousness of COVID-19, even as troubling reports about the disease emerged from China. “Before the pandemic, Trump would have gotten my vote again,” he says. “Business was booming, the economy was good, it looked like everything was turned around.”

For Heidi, the stakes were personal: In March, her uncle had to visit the ER three times before he could get tested for COVID-19, she says. By the time he was finally admitted to the hospital on March 23, he was so sick he had to be put in a medically induced coma. He was on a ventilator for 28 days before his condition improved, she says. Trump “is sitting there touting that nobody has an issue with getting a test,” says Heidi. “And that’s not true.”

One of the defining questions of the 2020 election is how many Trump voters feel in November like Heidi and Dennis Hodges do now. Over the past four years, Trump has developed a Teflon mystique: no matter what he says or does, nothing seems to stick to him. Predicting that the latest outrage will finally sever his bond with supporters has been a mug’s game. And even as the coronavirus crisis escalated in March and April, there have been few signs that this is changing: 93% of self-described Republicans said during the first half of April that they approved of Trump’s performance, according to Gallup—up two points from a month prior.

Yet there is also little question that the pandemic has transformed the election. Two months ago, Trump was an incumbent president riding a strong economy and a massive cash advantage; today, he looks like an underdog in November. The RealClearPolitics polling average has former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, leading Trump 48.3% to 42% nationally. Trump’s prospects aren’t any brighter right now when broken down by states that were key to his 2016 victory. According to Real Clear Politics polling averages, Biden leads Trump by 6.7 points in Pennsylvania, 5.5 in Michigan, and 2.7 points in Wisconsin. Biden is also leading Trump narrowly in Florida and Arizona.



more...

https://time.com/5829244/trump-voters-coronavirus-2020/

May 1, 2020

Queen + Adam Lambert - 'You Are The Champions'

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Queen + Adam Lambert - 'You Are The Champions' (New Lockdown version! Recorded on mobile phones!)

May 1, 2020

The White Privilege to Terrorize

https://johnpavlovitz.com/2020/05/01/the-white-privilege-to-terrorize/

The White Privilege to Terrorize
May 1, 2020 / John Pavlovitz


As a white man watching the Michigan protests of Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home orders, all I could think was:

Black people don’t get to do this.
Muslims don’t get to do this.
Latinos don’t get to do this.
People who don’t look like this don’t get to do this.

They don’t get to swarm American capitol buildings in tactical gear with high-powered weapons, screaming in close proximity to police officers.
They don’t get to dress up like Call of Duty cosplayers and attempt to physically intimidate politicians into bending to their wills.
They don’t get to get to stop traffic in city streets decked out like they work at the Death Star and brazenly wield semi-automatic rifles.
They don’t get to terrorize decent people and walk away.

Only white people get to do this.

This violence is a singular privilege afforded to caucasian men in America.

snip//

This is MAGA America in its dawning renaissance of outward racism, showing us what is at stake as we approach another election. We aren’t just choosing a president or party to steward us through the coming years, we’re making a statement on what we will and will not tolerate as a people.

What we witnessed in Michigan was an act of terrorism, by the very definition of the word. We have seen many such acts this week, and if November allows this malevolence another four years, they will seem tame. The self-appointed soldiers in the army of the lord will grow more brazen and become more violent in their holy war to make America whiter—so decent white people need to resist them in the streets, on social media, and at the polls.

I fully suspect people of color will oppose this presidency in large numbers, because they see the disparity.

What I hope and pray, is that more white people, especially those who claim to be Christian, will also stand to reject the supremacy and racism that yields such willful homegrown terrorism; that we will use the unearned currency of our privilege to declare this violence un-American and inhuman and unacceptable.

White terrorists can no longer have a friend in the White House—not if we really want to make America great.

May 1, 2020

Trump urges Michigan's Whitmer to 'make a deal' with those protesting stay-at-home order

How I detest him. Make a deal??

Trump urges Michigan's Whitmer to 'make a deal' with those protesting stay-at-home order
By Morgan Chalfant - 05/01/20 09:47 AM EDT


President Trump on Friday urged Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) to negotiate and “make a deal” with those protesting her stay-at-home order in the state.

“The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire,” Trump tweeted Friday morning. “These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal.”

Whitmer extended the stay-at-home order in her state on Thursday, after hundreds of protesters, some of them armed, demonstrated outside the state Capitol. The Republican-led legislature, meanwhile, debated inside and ultimately declined to extend the state’s emergency declaration and voted to bring forth a lawsuit challenging Whitmer’s power.

Whitmer’s new executive actions, issued later Thursday, extend business closures and declare a state of emergency until May 28.



more...

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/495629-trump-urges-michigans-whitmer-to-make-a-deal-with-those-protesting

April 30, 2020

Club Rules

Club Rules
May 2020
When the commander in chief departs the White House, he's typically welcomed into a close-knit brotherhood of former presidents. In an exclusive excerpt from her new book, Team of Five, KATE ANDERSEN BROWER reveals why Donald Trump will be left out of the world's most elite fraternity
KATE ANDERSEN BROWER


IT IS A BRILLIANTLY sunny day in the spring of 2019 when I sit down across from President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, ready to discuss how he imagines a particular aspect of his postpresidential life—that of his relationship with his fellow former presidents. Because one overlooked casualty of Trump's norm-defying presidential tenure is the way he has upended the unspoken rules among living former presidents, who have traditionally welcomed one another enthusiastically, regardless of party, into the world's most exclusive club.

In the club, which has its own set of expectations and its own unique set of personalities, power is never completely relinquished—the four living former presidents will always be called Mr. President, and that is how they want it. During the Trump era from January 2017 to November 2018, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama were all members of the so-called Presidents Club, until the elder Bush's death. Despite their different political trajectories, all have lived their postpresidential years fully understanding what is expected of them. Some are more engaged than others, but there is a precedent they all adhere to—with the exception of Carter, who has paid for his disobedience with occasional suspensions from the club. At times throughout history, other former presidents have shirked these rules, but doing so has come at a steep price—their all-important legacies are forever tarnished.

By the time I meet Trump in the Oval Office, I have already spent two years interviewing top aides, close friends, and family members of the former presidents, and traveled to Plains, Georgia, to sit down with the Carters. We are nearly a year away from the early, uncertain days of the novelcoronavirus pandemic, when Trump will tell a CNBC reporter, "We have it totally under control.... It's going to be just fine."

Former presidents used to help each other in times of crisis. Trump has made that impossible. He has not spoken with Obama or Clinton since his inauguration more than three years ago (aside from a brief hello and goodbye to Obama during George H.W. Bush's funeral in December 2018). In fact, the only substantive conversation he and Obama have had was during the customary visit Trump made to the Oval Office two days after he won the 2016 election. He has been criticizing him ever since. "I didn't like the job that he and Biden did," Trump said at a Fox News Town Hall in March. "I didn't like the position they put us in." Seeking to justify his administration's bungled response to the novel-coronavirus outbreak in America, he attacked Obama, tweeting that his handling of the 2009 H1N1 swine flu was "a full scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem..." Contrast that with John F. Kennedy, who called on all three of his living predecessors to ask for their help during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A year and a half earlier, after the Bay of Pigs disaster, Kennedy had reached out to the man he'd just defeated, Richard Nixon, and to his Republican predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. He knew he could not afford to be too proud to ask for help. " No one knows how rough this j ob is until after he has been in it a few months," Kennedy confessed to Eisenhower.

Ronald Reagan sent Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Carter to Anwar Sadat's 1981 Cairo funeral during a sensitive global moment that could have precipitated more violence. And then there's the way the former presidents supported George W. Bush after 9/11, and how George H.W. Bush and Clinton traveled the world together, seeking help after the tsunami in Asia, and in their leadership roles raising money after Hurricane Katrina. They became near-constant companions, doing interviews together and even traveling with George W. as part of the American delegation to Pope John Paul 11's 2005 funeral in Rome. "Come on," Bush senior implored Clinton, "it will be better with you along." Nicknamed "the A-team" in the press, they became like father and son. Time made them Partners of the Year in its 2005 Person of the Year issue. After seeing how powerful the Clinton-Bush team was, President Obama dispatched George W. Bush and Clinton to Haiti to raise awareness and funds after the devastating 2010 earthquake. This kind of teamwork and camaraderie now seems unthinkable and almost quaint.

Former presidents typically don't initiate calls to the sitting president to offer their help because it could come across as meddling. But two people close to George W. Bush say that Bush is open to a call from Trump, even though there is no love lost between the two men. They haven't spoken at any length since two phone calls during the confirmation of controversial Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who had worked in the Bush White House. One former top Tmmp official who knows both men well said that if Trump were to call on Bush for help during this pandemic, Bush would "swallow hard, and he would help however he can for the good of the nation. That's the kind of person he is." But Trump's doing that is nearly inconceivable. "His ego and his dismissal of the former presidents are all part of his mindset," this person said on the condition of anonymity. "Early on I was shocked by some of the things he said about the former presidents. It's not pretty. In my lifetime I haven't seen a president so self-centered," adding, "it is ironic that Trump doesn't hesitate to call up strongmen autocrats like Putin and Erdogan—who are not our friends—but he wouldn't call up Obama, Clinton, or even Bush during this crisis."

Given all of this, it is hard to imagine that, whenever he does leave the White House, Trump will receive a warm welcome into the club. He has accused his immediate predecessor of wiretapping his office ahead of the 2016 election and called his most recent Republican predecessor's foreign policy the worst in history. He perpetually notes that his relationships with other world leaders are better than those of former presidents. But have the years he's spent in that awe-inspiring office given him empathy for what his predecessors went through? "No," he replies flatly. Unlike most of the men who came before him, who aged prematurely and struggled with insomnia while in office, often pacing the halls of the White House in the dead of the night, overwhelmed by the gravity of the position, Trump said he has no trouble sleeping.

more...

https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2020/5/club-rules

April 30, 2020

The Rude Pundit: Trump Believes That People Who Die of Coronavirus Are Losers

https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2020/04/trump-believes-that-people-who-died-of.html


The Rude Pundit
Proudly lowering the level of political discourse
4/30/2020
Trump Believes That People Who Die of Coronavirus Are Losers

snip//

Trump has made a big show about how he refuses to wear a mask because he's been tested and doesn't have coronavirus. At the event Tuesday, in Oval Office gatherings, neither Trump nor the people there, including Drs. Birx and Fauci, wear masks. You know that he sees wearing a mask as a sign of weakness. You know that he's demanded that no one be allowed to wear masks. No one is gonna make him look like a disease-fearing pussy. He is the uber-mensch. All others cower beneath his exceedingly healthy orange glow.

Essentially, that's his attitude towards the dead. If you get sick, you are weak and you are preventing the economy from "roaring back." If you die, you're a loser because it makes him look bad. Here's what he managed to say yesterday: "We mourn — and I have to say this so strongly — we mourn every life tragically lost to the invisible enemy, and we’re heartened that the worst of the pain and suffering is going to be behind us." The worst is not "behind us." We're in the worst right now, with cases rising in some states, falling in others, and staying steady in the others. The sick and the dead are inconvenient because they prevent him from gallivanting around the country and prancing like a coked-out baboon in front of his adoring, cretinous crowds. He talked about how tragic it would be to have social distancing at his rallies of the damned: "I can’t imagine a rally where you have every fourth seat full. Every — every six seats are empty for every one that you have full. That wouldn’t look too good." Your fever and cough are keeping the president from having good-looking campaign events, you selfish fucks.

But I keep coming back to that fuckin' question. Trump admitted that he has not reached out to a single family of someone who died. He didn't take any time to ring up some widow in Alabama or Texas or Kansas, the states that he won. That's just fucked up. He can't because to do so would be to concede that the deaths mean something beyond lower approval ratings. He can't because he's incapable of exuding the kind of empathy that's necessary to come across as anything other than the popularity-driven, praise-thirsty, narcissistic monster that he is.

Instead, he pretends that 60,000 deaths are bad, but, hey, a million deaths is worse and China must be lying; he's petulantly defensive, pissed off that all these weak losers are dying and that he's supposed to pretend to care. Fuck that. Not when it's more fun to shitpost about Brian Williams or CNN.

He says the disease is going to disappear "like a miracle," except it's not. It's going to slowly peter out, the bodies stacking up, becoming to him like a wall preventing his reelection. Your death means nothing more and nothing less.

April 30, 2020

Georgia's Experiment in Human Sacrifice

Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice
The state is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.
Amanda Mull
April 29, 2020


At first, Derek Canavaggio thought he would be able to ride out the coronavirus pandemic at home until things were safe. As a bar manager at the Globe in Athens, Georgia, Canavaggio hasn’t been allowed to work for weeks. Local officials in Athens issued Georgia’s first local shelter-in-place order on March 19, canceling the events that usually make spring a busy time for Athens bars and effectively eliminating the city’s rowdy downtown party district built around the University of Georgia. The state’s governor, Brian Kemp, followed in early April with a statewide shutdown.

But then the governor sent Canavaggio into what he calls “spreadsheet hell.” In an announcement last week, Kemp abruptly reversed course on the shutdown, ending many of his own restrictions on businesses and overruling those put in place by mayors throughout the state. On Friday, gyms, churches, hair and nail salons, and tattoo parlors were allowed to reopen, if the owners were willing. Yesterday, restaurants and movie theaters came back. The U-turn has left Georgians scrambling. Canavaggio has spent days crunching the numbers to figure out whether reopening his bar is worth the safety risk, or even feasible in the first place, given how persistent safety concerns could crater demand for a leisurely indoor happy hour. “We can’t figure out a way to make the numbers work to sustain business and pay rent and pay everybody to go back and risk their lives,” he told me. “If we tried to open on Monday, we’d be closed in two weeks, probably for good and with more debt on our hands.”

Kemp’s order shocked people across the country. For weeks, Americans have watched the coronavirus sweep from city to city, overwhelming hospitals, traumatizing health-care workers, and leaving tens of thousands of bodies in makeshift morgues. Georgia has been hit particularly hard by the pandemic, and the state’s testing efforts have provided an incomplete look at how far the virus continues to spread. That testing capacity—which public-health leaders consider necessary for safely ending lockdowns—has lagged behind the nation’s for much of the past two months. Kemp’s move to reopen was condemned by scientists, high-ranking Republicans from his own state, and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms; it even drew a public rebuke from President Donald Trump, who had reportedly approved the measures before distancing himself from the governor amid the backlash.

Public-health officials broadly agree that reopening businesses—especially those that require close physical contact—in places where the virus has already spread will kill people. Even so, many other states are quietly considering similar moves to Georgia’s. Most are taking a more measured approach—waiting a bit longer to reopen, setting testing or infection benchmarks that must first be met—but some, such as Oklahoma and Colorado, have already put similar plans in motion. By acting with particular haste in what he calls a crucial move to restore economic stability, Kemp has positioned Georgia at the center of a national fight over whether to stay the course with social distancing or try to return to some semblance of normalcy. But it’s easy to misunderstand which Americans stand on each side. Many Georgians have no delusions about the risks of reopening, even if they need to return to work for financial reasons. Among the dozen local leaders, business owners, and workers I spoke with for this article, all said they know some people who disagreed with the lockdown but were complying nonetheless. No one reported serious acrimony in their communities.

Instead, their stories depict a struggle between a state government and ordinary people. Georgia’s brash reopening puts much of the state’s working class in an impossible bind: risk death at work, or risk ruining yourself financially at home. In the grips of a pandemic, the approach is a morbid experiment in just how far states can push their people. Georgians are now the largely unwilling canaries in an invisible coal mine, sent to find out just how many individuals need to lose their job or their life for a state to work through a plague.

more...

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-georgia-reopening-coronavirus-pandemic/610882/

April 30, 2020

Donald Trump prepares to move into his 2020 campaign by blaming COVID-19 on China and ... Joe Biden

Donald Trump prepares to move into his 2020 campaign by blaming COVID-19 on China and ... Joe Biden
Mark Sumner
Daily Kos Staff
Thursday April 30, 2020 · 9:29 AM EDT


Being impeached has not slowed down Donald Trump’s attempts to weaponize intelligence agencies and foreign policy against political opponents. In fact, receiving a free pass from Senate Republicans in spite of overwhelming evidence of guilt has made it clear to Trump that he really can dragoon the whole mechanism of the federal government into the Trump 2020 campaign. For months, Attorney General William Barr and special Q-spiracy pal John Durham have been jetting around the world, trying to convince foreign governments to help Trump out by backing up conspiracy theories that he can use in his campaign against Joe Biden.

But as Trump prepares to kick the 2020 campaign into high gear, the situation in the world has changed. That’s going to require a whole new level of conspiracy theory. Now Ukraine is tired and China is wired as Donald Trump prepares to connect Joe Biden to the coronavirus.

Trump is preparing to launch his first major ad campaign for the 2020 election. Doing so at a time when the United States has over 1 million cases of COVID-19 and the death toll has just passed 61,000 may seem somewhat … problematic. But as Jared Kushner proved on Wednesday, the Trump White House is fully prepared to point out that there are still 327 million Americans who are not dead. Yet. That somehow makes saddling the U.S. with a third of all cases around the globe a “great success story.”

According to Politico, the first flight of ads will depict Trump as “showing leadership” despite having to fight against those darned Democrats and that enemy of the people, the free press. Undoubtably, these ads will focus on how Nancy Pelosi distracted Trump from preparing to face the novel coronavirus by moving forward with impeachment. It was, in fact, such a distraction, that Trump could barely manage to fill the entire months of January and February with golf and rallies.

The ads will also focus on just how eager Trump is to bring back the pre-virus economy. That’s a position that might also be a bit of a hard sell considering that the 4.8% shrinkage of the economy that was reported for the first quarter is likely to look like robust growth when the second quarter numbers come in. Donald Trump personally oversaw a disaster that is the biggest national health crisis, the biggest economic crisis, the biggest crisis since World War II, and he blew it—at a cost in lives that won’t be reckoned for months to come and a cost in damage to the economy that may genuinely bring conditions worse than the Great Depression. That is not a tenable position from which to start a campaign. Not even if it comes with a whole new motto.

Clearly what Trump needs is a solution, not one that can cure the virus or bring back jobs, one that allows him to pin the whole thing on someone else. With someone else being Joe Biden.

That’s why the ads won’t just blow the patriotic Trump-ets for more jobs and how-about-that-stock-market. The Republican National Committee has already been engaged in cranking out ads, especially on right-wing outlets, to keep Trump supporters pumped about his bigly leadership in the midst of the crisis. But the angle of those ads is about to change. Coming soon to a television, computer, and phone screen near you: ads that connect Joe Biden with China, along with accusations that China both created the coronavirus and covered up its spread.

more...

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/4/30/1941532/-Donald-Trump-prepares-to-move-into-his-2020-campaign-by-blaming-COVID-19-on-China-and-Joe-Biden

April 30, 2020

Guidelines call for 14-day drop in cases to reopen. No state has met them.

Guidelines call for 14-day drop in cases to reopen. No state has met them.
Diagnostic tests and contact tracing remain key to controlling the pandemic, experts say.
April 28, 2020, 7:02 PM EDT
By Erika Edwards


As a handful of states begin to ease stay-at-home restrictions, no state that has opted to reopen has come close to the federally recommended decline in cases over a 14-day period.

Even as the U.S. hit the grim milestone of more than 1 million cases Tuesday — one-third of the world's total — Georgia, Minnesota and other states are pushing to reopen businesses, even though new infection rates are still rising.

Some states, such as Colorado and Kentucky, have reported fewer new cases in the past week. But no single state has had a two-week decline in case numbers.

The 14-day guidelines, which President Donald Trump announced April 16, "make sense," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said during a media briefing Tuesday while acknowledging the economic dilemma.

"We want to reopen, but we want to do it without infecting more people or overwhelming the hospital system," Cuomo said.

more...

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/guidelines-call-14-day-drop-cases-reopen-no-state-has-n1194191?fbclid=IwAR3lPEZ1ae9MoyH2lcpCmm8JCjhAikFxt2O9Z6pNYw_ABbM7EWpO76JEHlE


CORRECTION (April 29, 2020, 1:38 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article mischaracterized the federal recommendations for when states can begin to reopen businesses. It is when a state's total coronavirus cases have declined over a 14-day period, not after 14 consecutive days of declining numbers.

April 30, 2020

Susan Rice Slams Jared Kushner's 'Ridiculous' Boast About U.S. Coronavirus Response

CORONAVIRUS 04/30/2020 03:04 am ET Updated 2 hours ago
Susan Rice Slams Jared Kushner’s ‘Ridiculous’ Boast About U.S. Coronavirus Response
The former national security adviser denounced Trump’s son-in-law for calling the Trump administration’s handling of the crisis “a great success story.”
By Josephine Harvey


Former national security adviser Susan Rice tore into Jared Kushner on Wednesday for claiming the federal government’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak has been a “great success story.”

snip//

Rice, a former Obama White House official, told CNN host Wolf Blitzer that Kushner’s claim “would be laughable if it weren’t so deadly serious.”



Rice also noted that according to the experts, the pandemic is far from over. Citing Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose judgment she said she trusts “implicitly,” Rice said that a second wave of infections is expected for the fall.

Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN that if states ease restrictions too soon, there could be a rebound that would “get us right back in the same boat that we were a few weeks ago” and that a second wave was “inevitable.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1255652845530968066

more...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/susan-rice-jared-kushner-success-story_n_5eaa560fc5b62eaf043ee7ba?ncid=engmodushpmg00000003&fbclid=IwAR2DAbPwF09nDTCoLUbH6oHHNdZ09v8fJoUrorFXLAp4M9GGwAXG7d8R6VM