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Bellblog
A curated collection of commentary on America in the age of Trump
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The Friday night news dump is a political trick with plenty of precedent. Wait till the vast majority of the news business clocks out for... the week, and announce something you’d rather they not cover as much. People won’t be reading... news at that point... and perhaps it’ll be dismissed as old news by Monday morning. Few are as blatant about using this tactic, though, as the Trump White House.
News broke late Friday night that Trump had removed the inspector general for the State Department, Steve Linick. It’s the third time in six weeks that such a move has been announced on a Friday night, with each inspector general having done something to... alienate Trump. The unprecedented spate of removals has reinforced how Trump is rather obviously seeking to undermine independent oversight of his administration.
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Linick... issued a report in August 2019 that alleged that leaders in the State Department had mistreated and harassed staffers and accused them of disloyalty to Trump, gave the House’s impeachment inquiry… documents detailing Ukraine disinformation [and] was allegedly investigating “misuse of a political appointee... to perform personal tasks for” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
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Acting Health and Human Services inspector general Christi Grimm [was] removed in favor of a permanent replacement... shortly after 8 P.M. on Friday, May 1. [She had] issued an April report finding “severe shortages” of coronavirus testing kits, delays in results and “widespread shortages” of equipment like masks.
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Intelligence community inspector general Michael Atkinson... removed [on] Friday, April 3, around 10 P.M. [had] forwarded the Ukraine whistleblower complaint to Congress after finding it to be “credible” and “urgent.” The complaint, which was overwhelmingly confirmed by impeachment witnesses, led to Trump’s impeachment... Trump repeatedly attacked the whistleblower complaint as being without merit and part of an alleged partisan campaign to remove him as president. After removing Atkinson, he specifically cited that action:
I thought he did a terrible job. Absolutely terrible. He took a whistleblower report, which turned out to be a fake report … and he brought it to Congress with an emergency. Not a big Trump fan, that I can tell you.
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In the decades following its founding in 1946, the CDC became a national pillar of public health and globally respected... However, funding to the CDC for a long time has been subject to conservative politics that have increasingly eroded the agency's ability to mount effective, evidence-based public health responses... The Trump administration further chipped away at the CDC's capacity to combat infectious diseases. CDC staff in China were cut back with the last remaining CDC officer recalled home from the China CDC in July, 2019, leaving an intelligence vacuum when COVID-19 began to emerge.
In a press conference on Feb. 25, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned U.S. citizens to prepare for major disruptions to movement and everyday life. Messonnier subsequently no longer appeared at White House briefings on COVID-19.
More recently, the Trump administration has questioned guidelines that the CDC has provided. These actions have undermined the CDC's leadership and its work during the... pandemic.
There is no doubt that the CDC has made mistakes, especially on testing... But punishing the agency by marginalising and hobbling it is not the solution. The administration is obsessed with magic bullets: vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear. But only a steadfast reliance on basic public health principles... will see the emergency brought to an end, and this requires an effective national public health agency. The CDC needs a director who can provide leadership without the threat of being silenced and who has the technical capacity to lead today's complicated effort.
The Trump administration's further erosion of the CDC will harm global cooperation in science and public health... A strong CDC is needed to respond to public health threats, both domestic and international, and to help prevent the next inevitable pandemic. Americans must put a president in the White House... who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.
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“The lockdown is... intended to be a giant pause button that buys you time to get ready for the next phase,” Jeremy Konyndyk, of the Center for Global Development think tank, says. But the Trump administration wasted the pause. Over the past two months, the U.S. should have built the testing, tracing, and quarantining infrastructure necessary to safely end lockdown and transition back to normalcy... Instead, Trump has substituted showmanship for action, playing the president on TV but refusing to do the actual job. He has both dominated the airwaves and abdicated his duties. As a result, America’s progress against the coronavirus has stalled, even as the lockdown has driven the economy into crisis.
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The awful choice... between endless lockdown or reckless reopening... needs to be understood for what it is: the failure of our political leaders to create a safer, middle path. “What we want to avoid in the reopening process is creating the conditions that led to us having to stay home in the first place,” writes Caitlin Rivers of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. That was the Trump administration’s job. Either they needed to do it, or they needed to support and empower the states to do it.
They have failed. It is the most profound and complete failure of presidential leadership in modern history.
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There are, at this point, a slew of reopening plans from think tanks and academics, economists and epidemiologists, liberals and conservatives... The Trump administration could have chosen any of these plans or produced its own. But it didn’t. The closest it has come is a set of guidelines for states to consult when reopening... The guidelines are not quite a plan, but they are at least a framework... President Trump, however, shows neither familiarity with, nor support for, his own guidelines. He routinely calls on states to reopen though they have not met the criteria his administration suggests.
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Americans don’t have a functional president, but we have someone playing a dysfunctional president on TV, and he’s keeping other leaders from successfully doing their jobs.
Some of Trump’s allies have tried to frame the president’s policy response, or lack thereof, as a principled commitment to small-government conservatism... This is creative but unconvincing... Trump’s approach to state needs has been transactional, not philosophical. He has been explicit in his belief that his administration should only engage with the governors that have been sufficiently politically supportive of him. At a press conference, Trump said he told Vice President Mike Pence:
Don’t call the governor of Washington. You’re wasting your time with him. Don’t call the woman in Michigan.
In this, as in so much else, the Trump administration is maneuvering around the president’s grudges and impulses. States, too, are having to maneuver around the... administration to secure their response. In a remarkable admission, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, told the Washington Post that after purchasing 500,000 tests from South Korea, he made sure the plane bearing the tests landed under the protection of state troopers because he feared the federal government would take for itself the tests he had fought to procure. The move reportedly enraged Trump, who “saw Maryland’s deal... as a bid to embarrass the president.”
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This is not a president who believes in federalism. It is, in truth, incoherence all the way down.
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The White House... has not even chosen a goal. The Trump administration has never decided whether the aim is “mitigation,” in which we slow the virus’s spread so the health system doesn’t get overwhelmed, or “suppression,” in which we try to eradicate the virus so as to save lives.
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This, then, is the state of things: the White House does not have a plan, it does not have a framework, it does not have a philosophy, and it does not have a goal. That is not because these things are impossible... It is not that the president is doing the wrong thing. He is doing basically nothing. But he has combined a substantive passivity with a showman’s desire to dominate the narrative and a political street fighter’s obsession with settling scores, so he is making the job of governors and mayors harder, neither giving them what they need to beat the virus nor leaving them to make their own decisions free from his interference and criticism.
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Americans have made tremendous sacrifices to buy their government time, and that time has been wasted. That is why we are left with an increasingly polarized, and polarizing, debate between endless lockdowns and reckless reopening. The government has failed to do what functional governments in other countries have done and create a better option.
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On one front after another, President Trump is prioritizing his efforts to create the illusion that the country is returning to normalcy over taking concrete steps that might make that actually happen safely. Which, perversely enough, is making that outcome less likely.
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Trump prizes his magical reality-bending powers so highly that he’d rather rely on them to deliver him reelection, because he fears taking the governing steps necessary to get us back to normalcy will render his reelection less likely, as well... the real world consequences be damned.
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Trump is loath to do too much in terms of standing up a federal response to the continuing scourge of the coronavirus, because it risks feeding the impression of an ongoing health crisis continuing to rampage out of control. That, in turn, could make it harder to get people to resume economic activity quickly. And that is his lodestar, at least in part for reelection purposes. But this has the situation exactly backward.
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The current response is trapped in a fallacy. Trump has decided that reopening the economy is such an urgent priority that nothing can be permitted to delay it. The economy can’t reopen until the health crisis is wrestled down to a greater extent, precisely because people won’t feel safe to resume economic activities... This would involve standing up a much more robust federal testing and tracing program... But Trump isn’t willing to do this.
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As CNN’s Jake Tapper reports, officials in Trump’s own government and on his coronavirus task force are urging him to “take the lead on an ambitious national testing program,” so “society can responsibly take steps to reopen.” But... Trump “so far has rebuffed those suggestions,” and is “opting instead to listen to voices” who think the private sector will generate enough testing supplies on its own, and are “eager to reopen the economy, at least partly motivated to boost the president’s reelection.”
And yet, if the economy isn’t going to reopen in the manner Trump himself wants until he stands up a much more robust testing program, why not do the latter? Trump himself hinted at the answer to this question... on Wednesday: “In a way, by doing all this testing we make ourselves look bad.”
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The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump was advised twice in January to press China to be more transparent about the outbreak in Wuhan. But Trump ignored the advice:
Early this year, several of Mr. Trump’s political advisers... urged him to take on China more directly, which they argued would have bipartisan appeal. One idea they suggested was a special commission to investigate the origins of the virus and whether Beijing responded sufficiently to control the outbreak. Mr. Trump twice declined suggestions from his team in January to press... for more transparency about the virus’s causes and symptoms, in one case saying that the criticism could cause Beijing to be less helpful, said White House officials.
In fact, Trump... went in the opposite direction. Trump repeatedly praised China’s coronavirus response through late February. And on two different occasions, he actually vouched for China’s transparency, despite the advice.
Trump... on Jan. 24, tweet[ed], “The United States greatly appreciates [China’s] efforts and transparency.” He was then asked directly on Feb. 7 whether he was “concerned that China is covering up the full extent of coronavirus.” He said flatly, “No… they’re working really hard, and I think they are doing a very professional job.”
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The efforts of those around Trump to get him to be tougher on China have gradually paid some dividends, with Trump intermittently adopting a harsher tone... He has regularly offered broad comments about how we know where the virus began and about how it could have been stopped earlier, although he often avoids invoking China directly.
One entity Trump has been willing to go after more strongly is the World Health Organization, which Trump has accused of being too friendly toward China. He has said the United States will withhold funding from the U.N. health agency. But Trump’s and his allies’ chief criticism of the WHO, that it has been too friendly toward China... could just as well be lodged at Trump himself... If the argument is that the WHO was too soft on China at the start, when it mattered most, what about Trump? If precious time was lost because the WHO was lending undue credibility to China’s statements and data... and was not taking the situation seriously enough, what to make of a U.S. president who was in many ways echoing the line that China was on top of the situation, in direct contrast to his advisers?
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When Trump says this could have been stopped earlier or that others... have been too soft on China, it rings pretty hollow.
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President Trump can’t handle the truth... when it makes his administration look bad. With his move Friday night to replace the top watchdog for the Department of Health and Human Services, the latest in a series of direct attacks on statutory oversight of his administration, it’s clear that the president remains committed to withholding the truth from the American people as well.
Mr. Trump’s latest target, Christi Grimm, is the department’s principal deputy inspector general, whose office issued a report a month ago revealing the dire state of the nation’s pandemic response. After hundreds of hospital administrators across the United States were interviewed, the report detailed enduring equipment shortages and concerns about testing.
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Asked about the results of the report at his April 6 news briefing, Mr. Trump declared... “It’s wrong.” The president then rushed to discredit Ms. Grimm... When told of Ms. Grimm’s two-plus decades in government under Republican and Democratic administrations, Mr. Trump dismissed her as an Obama-era agent of the deep state, an attack he continued on Twitter the next day. For Mr. Trump, there may be no greater betrayal than being the bearer of unflattering news about his administration.
In recent weeks, the president has been working to cleanse his administration of officials he considers insufficiently loyal... Mr. Trump has displayed a particular hostility to inspectors general. On April 3, he informed Congress he would be firing Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community who alerted lawmakers to the existence of a whistle-blower complaint about Ukraine that ultimately led to the president’s impeachment. At the same time, Mr. Trump announced his intention to install a handful of new inspectors general throughout the administration, including naming a White House aide to the new post of special inspector general for a pandemic business rescue fund. On April 7, he ousted the acting inspector general for the Defense Department, Glenn Fine, who had been tapped... to head a new panel tasked with overseeing how the government spends $2 trillion in coronavirus relief. This came less than two weeks after the president issued a signing statement that he would disregard some of the oversight measures contained in the CARES Act (or, as he called the measures, “impermissible forms of congressional aggrandizement”).
Republican lawmakers say they are “concerned” about Mr. Trump’s war on accountability... In response to Mr. Atkinson’s firing, a bipartisan group of senators, including the Republicans Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah, called on the president to explain his decision. In an April 8 letter, they reminded him that inspectors general report “to both the president and Congress, to secure efficient, robust and independent agency oversight,” and they noted that he had failed to abide by the notification requirements for the removal of an inspector general. They requested, in the name of “transparency and accountability,” that Mr. Trump address their concerns by April 13. The White House could not be bothered.
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Mr. Trump has made clear that he considers any efforts to hold him accountable to be, by definition, illegitimate. Republicans, by their actions rather than their words, have done little to disabuse him of this notion. Since the G.O.P. controls the Senate, Democrats would need Republican support to check the power of the executive branch. It hasn’t been forthcoming.
On matters ranging from domestic spending to U.S. military intervention in Yemen to the appointment of administration officials, Mr. Trump has stiff-armed Congress. When lawmakers refused to fund construction of a border wall, Mr. Trump declared a faux national emergency and redirected billions from the Pentagon to build it anyway. Doing so runs roughshod over Congress’s constitutionally invested power of the purse.
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Congressional capitulation is dangerous in ordinary times. Now, with a pandemic killing thousands of Americans every day and lawmakers having handed the administration trillions of taxpayer dollars in relief funding, the need for effective checks and balances has never been more acute.
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President Trump moved on Friday night to replace a top official at the Department of Health and Human Services who angered him with a report last month highlighting supply shortages and testing delays at hospitals during the coronavirus pandemic. The White House waited until after business hours to announce the nomination of a new inspector general for the department who, if confirmed, would take over for Christi A. Grimm, the principal deputy inspector general who was publicly assailed by the president at a news briefing three weeks ago.
The nomination was the latest effort by Mr. Trump against watchdog offices around his administration that have defied him. In recent weeks, he fired an inspector general involved in the inquiry that led to the president’s impeachment, nominated a White House aide to another key inspector general post overseeing virus relief spending and moved to block still another inspector general from taking over as chairman of a pandemic spending oversight panel.
Mr. Trump has sought to assert more authority over his administration and clear out officials deemed insufficiently loyal in the three months since his Senate impeachment trial on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress ended in acquittal largely along party lines. While inspectors general are appointed by the president, they are meant to be semiautonomous watchdogs ferreting out waste, fraud and corruption in executive agencies.
The purge has continued unabated even during the coronavirus pandemic that has claimed about 65,000 lives in the United States. Ms. Grimm’s case in effect merged the conflict over Mr. Trump’s response to the outbreak with his determination to sweep out those he perceives to be speaking out against him.
Her report, released last month and based on extensive interviews with hospitals around the country, identified critical shortages of supplies, revealing that hundreds of medical centers were struggling to obtain test kits, protective gear for staff members and ventilators. Mr. Trump was embarrassed by the report at a time he was already under fire for playing down the threat of the virus and not acting quickly enough to ramp up testing and provide equipment to doctors and nurses.
“It’s just wrong,” the president said when asked about the report on April 6.
Did I hear the word “inspector general”? Really? It’s wrong. And they’ll talk to you about it. It’s wrong.
He then sought to find out who wrote the report.
Where did he come from, the inspector general? What’s his name? No, what’s his name? What’s his name?
When the reporter did not know, Mr. Trump insisted. “Well, find me his name,” the president said. “Let me know.” He expressed no interest in the report’s findings except to categorically reject them sight unseen.
After learning that Ms. Grimm had worked during President Barack Obama’s administration, Mr. Trump asserted that the report was politically biased. In fact, Ms. Grimm is not a political appointee but a career official who began working in the inspector general office late in President Bill Clinton’s administration and served under President George W. Bush as well as Mr. Obama. She took over the office in an acting capacity when the previous inspector general stepped down. Mr. Trump was undaunted and attacked her on Twitter.
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President Donald Trump’s new coronavirus testing overview and blueprint... offers little in the way of actual assurances to the states while insisting that most of the work of scaling up testing will be left to them. It calls on states to develop their own plans and identify hurdles on their own. It says nothing specific about what steps (if any) the federal government will take to increase the number of tests, instead passing the buck to others. The federal government, the plan says, is merely a “supplier of last resort.”
In fact, it’s not clear if the plan will significantly increase testing. In unveiling the plan on Monday, administration officials promised the U.S. will reach at least 8 million tests a month by the end of May. That’s roughly 260,000 tests a day... barely more than the 220,000 a day that the U.S. already averaged over the past week.
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Experts say far more testing is needed. On the low end, they’ve called for at least 500,000 tests a day. At the high end, some have called for as many as tens of millions of tests a day, which they say would let public health officials truly track and subsequently contain the full outbreak without as much social distancing.
This much testing is, however, expensive. Paul Romer, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has projected that the U.S. needs more than 20 million tests each day, effectively letting the country test each person in the country every two weeks. He estimated that would cost $100 billion, which... pales in comparison to the cost of keeping the economy shut down. But the only way that level of investment in testing will happen... is if the federal government gets more involved.
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The current testing gaps come down to supply. The White House has said that the U.S. currently has the machines to conduct more than 2 million tests a day. But a shortfall of supplies... swabs for collecting samples and reagents for the tests themselves... has kept the U.S. from reaching anywhere close to that number.
This is a giant obstacle to safely reopening the economy. Every major plan to combat the pandemic and pull back social distancing relies on testing to fully understand the extent of the outbreak and keep it in check. Without that, the only options are more social distancing, with the economic harm that entails, or letting the pandemic run its course... at the cost of potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of lives. The White House, however, has offered no concrete answers on what the country will do next to fix this problem.
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Vice President Mike Pence wants people to believe that when he made an unfulfilled promise in March that “we literally are going to see a dramatic increase in the availability of testing,” he was talking about the distribution of test kits, and not the actual processing of those kits... That’s the spin Pence offered during Monday’s White House coronavirus press briefing.
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ABC’s Jon Karl grilled Pence about the discrepancy between what he said in March and what has happened since.
Mr. Vice President, you said... we’d by at 4 million tests by the following week. We’ve just now got there in the last few days... So what have you learned about what went wrong over the last month and a half or two months, and what’s going to go right now? What lessons have you learned from the mistakes?
Pence initially responded by rejecting the question.
I appreciate the question, but it represents a misunderstanding on your part and, frankly, a lot of... the public’s part about the difference between having a test versus the ability to actually process the test... What the president brought about with this public-private partnership has brought us to the point where we’ve done 5.4 million tests to date.
The fact is, while... the number of coronavirus tests completed per day in the U.S. has indeed started to tick up over the past week, from about 150,000 per day to 200,000, the country’s testing capacity is still lagging far behind where experts say it needs to be to safely relax social distancing recommendations. And these numbers are nowhere near where Pence suggested they would be on March 10, when he told reporters... that “before the end of this week, another 4 million tests will be distributed.” (The U.S. didn’t actually hit more than 4 million tests completed until last week, more than a month later.)
As I’ve detailed, Pence is in the habit of misleadingly touting the raw number of tests completed and not the number completed per day, which obfuscates the reality that per-day testing capacity was largely flat until late last week... Perhaps with this in mind, Karl followed up by asking Pence... “So when you promised 4 million tests seven weeks ago, you were just talking about tests being sent out, not actually being completed?” he asked. “Precisely correct,” Pence replied.
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Donald Trump's go-to excuse for why the federal government hasn't done more to ramp up efforts to test Americans for the novel coronavirus... is that this should be the responsibility of state governments... When governors complain that they can't ramp up coronavirus testing, because there's nowhere near enough capacity, Trump denies it, claiming that governors "don't want to use all of the capacity that we've created." When asked why testing rates have stayed mostly flat for the past month, Trump of course turns it around and pins blame on the governors, falsely claiming they haven't asked for help.
It should be obvious what's going on. The Trump administration is doing everything possible to hamstring states' capacity to perform the large-scale testing that would be needed to end the lockdowns safely and reopen the economy. When Trump is called out for this, he lies about it. He literally doesn't want more testing. But why?
Maryland's Republican governor, Larry Hogan, told... CNN, "Every governor in America has been pushing and fighting and clawing to get more tests," and said it was "absolutely false" to claim there's enough testing capacity. Michigan's Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, also pointed the finger at Trump, saying that her state has "the capacity to double or triple the number of tests that we're doing," but because Trump refuses to enact the Defense Production Act to force the production of those materials, they are falling short.
Hogan got so frustrated with the federal government's inaction that he and his wife... independently negotiated a deal with South Korea to secure half a million test kits for Maryland. But... rather than congratulating Hogan for taking initiative, Trump was livid, making the clearly false accusation that a nearby governor from his own party didn't do enough to get help from the White House.
During negotiations over the latest coronavirus aid bill, the White House did everything it could to shoot down suggestions from both Democrats and Republicans for ways to make coronavirus testing more efficient. While Trump keeps saying he will invoke the Defense Production Act to generate more supplies, he also keeps coming up with excuses for why he hasn't actually done it.
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The conclusion here is simple... Trump doesn't particularly want Americans to be tested for the coronavirus. Some pundits and politicians seem unwilling to draw this conclusion, at least in public, in no small part because it doesn't seem to make sense.
No one is under any illusions that Trump cares about the American public, of course. But mass testing seems like it would clearly be in the president's self-interest. His best chance at winning re-election is for the economy to be safely reopened, and at least partly recover, before November. But that simply can't be done without mass testing. Trying to reopen the economy without doing that... is just likely to cause the virus to spread more rapidly, which will only worsen the economic downturn. So... why is a notorious narcissist whose only plausible motivation is his own self-interest not doing the one thing that would benefit him in this crisis? Because Trump isn't capable of seeing widespread testing, and more accurate information about the spread of the virus, as being in his self-interest... The more tests that are done, the more confirmed cases are counted, and his impulse is to conceal that larger number if he possibly can. So he's trying to keep the official case count as low as possible.
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It's not like he's hidden... this desire from the public. "I like the numbers being where they are," Trump said back in March, in justifying his decision to prevent passengers on a cruise ship where the coronavirus was spreading from disembarking. His logic was simple, if idiotic: as long as those infected people stayed on the water, Trump didn't have to count them in the "official" numbers, which at that point were extremely low. Manipulating that number matters more to him than the health and well-being of human beings.
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Lying about statistics is at the heart of who Trump is... The Washington Post fact-checker counts 291 lies Trump has told about the economic numbers, 257 lies about the size of the border wall, 197 lies about the size of his tax cuts, and 177 lies about the size of trade deficits with China... Trump has a compulsive desire to manipulate statistics to flatter himself, even in cases... where the lie is visible for all to see and he has nothing to gain by pushing it.
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Unfortunately, Trump's instinctive impulse to manipulate numbers has become deadly in the coronavirus era... Trump is doing everything he can to stop Americans from getting coronavirus tests, and lying about it, because he wants to artificially deflate a number he thinks makes him look bad.
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George Gianforcaro, owner of Indutex USA, told the New York Daily News the Federal Emergency Management Agency confiscated 400,000 masks in two imported shipments meant for his U.S. customers. He said the masks, which arrived in separate shipments April 6 and April 19, are being held at John F. Kennedy International Airport, apparently in limbo as federal officials work out where they should go next... Once he got a lawyer involved, FEMA finally sent him something in writing, explaining his equipment was being held under the authority of the Defense Production Act. He said his customers include nursing facilities, police departments and the state of Michigan.
That sound you heard was the penny dropping. Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, is not the administrator’s favorite... The president has pronounced her a big meanie who is insufficiently grateful to him for thus far keeping the death toll in this country out of six figures.
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Meanwhile, in an radio interview with Hugh Hewitt, inexcusable Senate Majority Leader and alleged human being Mitch McConnell has decided that he’s fed up with those freeloading states in general.
I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route... My guess is their first choice would be for the federal government to borrow money from future generations to send it down to them now so they don’t have to do that. That’s not something I’m going to be in favor of.
Extortion seems to be contagious as well.
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A White House official ordered a CNN reporter to give up her front-row seat and move to the back of the press room before President Trump’s briefing on Friday, in what appears to be another attempt by Trump to punish a network he calls “fake news.” The reporter... Kaitlan Collins, refused to move, as did a second reporter whose seat in the rear of the room she was ordered to take. The official then suggested the matter would be resolved by the Secret Service, though no action was taken.
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Network reporters... have assigned seats at the front of the briefing room, under a plan managed by the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) and agreed to by White House officials last month... The WHCA has managed press access to the room for decades, with few objections from the White House. But the White House has now unilaterally sought to assert its authority over reporters twice in the past month.
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The White House’s latest effort... came after a brief verbal clash between Collins and Trump during the televised briefing on Thursday. The run-in occurred after Trump dismissed a question from another reporter about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s health, saying it was based on an “incorrect” report from CNN earlier in the week. As Collins tried to ask a follow-up question, Trump interrupted her:
No, that’s enough... The problem is, you don’t write the truth... No, not CNN. I told you, CNN is fake news. Don’t talk to me.
On Friday, just before the start of the president’s briefing, Collins was ordered to swap seats with Chris Johnson, a reporter for the Washington Blade. Johnson was in the sixth row of the seven-row seating area... Collins and Johnson refused to move, citing their seat assignments. The briefing then went ahead as planned, though Trump declined to take any questions from reporters, and walked off after only 22 minutes, making it the shortest briefing since regular sessions began last month.
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CNN has long been a target of Trump’s reprisals. In late 2018, Trump banned Jim Acosta, its chief White House correspondent, but a federal court, acting on a CNN lawsuit, said the president’s action was unconstitutional and ordered Acosta reinstated. Trump has also taken action against Collins, banning her from an open press event in 2018 after objecting to questions she asked earlier in the day.
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The president has spoken for more than 28 hours in the 35 briefings held since March 16, eating up 60 percent of the time that officials spoke, according to a Washington Post analysis of annotated transcripts... Over the past three weeks, the tally comes to more than 13 hours of Trump, including two hours spent on attacks and 45 minutes praising himself and his administration, but just 4½ minutes expressing condolences for coronavirus victims. He spent twice as much time promoting an unproven antimalarial drug that was the object of a Food and Drug Administration warning Friday. Trump also said something false or misleading in nearly a quarter of his prepared comments or answers to questions.
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The Post analysis of Trump’s daily coronavirus briefings over the past three weeks... reveals a president using the White House lectern to vent and rage; to dispense dubious and even dangerous medical advice; and to lavish praise upon himself and his government.
Trump has attacked someone in 113 out of 346 questions he has answered, or a third of his responses. He has offered false or misleading information in nearly 25 percent of his remarks. And he has played videos praising himself and his administration’s efforts three times, including one that was widely derided as campaign propaganda produced by White House aides at taxpayer expense.
The president repeatedly returns to the same topics, frequently treating questions as cues for familiar talking points. He has, for instance, mentioned the nation’s testing capacity in 14 percent of his comments, talked about the country’s ventilator supply in 12 percent and waxed on about his imposition of travel bans... in 9 percent.
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The medical professionals... received significantly less airtime than Trump. Deborah Birx, who oversees the administration’s virus response, spoke close to six hours, while Anthony S. Fauci, an infectious disease expert, spoke for just over two hours at 22 of the briefings. Trump has also offered a response to a question posed to someone else more than a third of the time that occurred, including queries that the intended official had already answered.
Expressions of empathy from Trump are rare. The president has mentioned coronavirus victims in just eight briefings in three weeks, mostly in prepared remarks... Last Sunday, as the death toll in the United States climbed past 40,000 and more than 22 million Americans were unemployed, a CNN reporter sparked Trump’s ire when he noted the grim milestones and asked, “Is this really the time for self-congratulations?”
“What I’m doing is I’m standing up for the men and women that have done such an incredible job,” Trump responded. He added that he was “also sticking up for doctors and nurses and military doctors and nurses,” before eventually angrily dismissing the question as “fake news.”
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Like his campaign rallies, the president’s portion of the daily briefings are rife with misinformation. Over the past three weeks, 87 of his comments or answers... included factually inaccurate comments.
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Much like his rallies, where Trump often harangues the media from the stage, he uses his briefings as an opportunity to spar with and berate the press. On Thursday, when a Post reporter noted that people tuning into the briefings “want to get information and guidance and want to know what to do,” Trump turned his frustration on the reporter, whom he dismissed as “a total faker.”
“I’m the president and you’re fake news,” Trump said.
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When the Treasury Department mails checks to Americans as part of the CARES Act economic rescue package, those checks will bear Donald Trump’s signature. Unsurprisingly... it was the president’s idea. But I’d like to draw your attention to this:
The decision to have the paper checks bear Trump’s name, in the works for weeks... was announced early Tuesday to the IRS’s information technology team. The team, working from home, is now racing to implement a programming change that two senior IRS officials said will probably lead to a delay in issuing the first batch of paper checks.
Yes, the delay in getting assistance to struggling Americans is appalling. But what’s most striking is that the Internal Revenue Service... already understaffed and overworked after years of budget cuts... is now devoting resources to implementing a public relations task meant to make Trump look good.
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It’s emblematic of the larger problem we confront. At this moment of unprecedented crisis, in the midst of a pandemic and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the president himself (and consequently, much of the administrative structure that surrounds him) is focused intently not on dealing with the practical challenges that confront the nation but with putting on a show.
For decades, some have worried that the spectacle of politics was overtaking the substance... But every previous president used the spectacle as a way to package and sell substance. With Trump, the spectacle is the substance. It’s not a tool to build and maintain support for an agenda. It’s the beginning and end, the whole purpose of the enterprise.
As of Wednesday morning, more than 600,000 COVID-19 infections had been reported in the United States... More than 26,000 Americans have died... Job losses are now projected to reach 25 million or more. Confronted with this emergency, the president somehow has the time to spend up to two hours or more every day in the White House briefing room, insisting that his performance has been spectacular and haranguing reporters who fail to offer him enough praise.
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Determined to “open the country” on May 1, just two weeks from now... he read off a list of 200 names, mostly corporate CEOs, who are supposedly going to “advise” him on how to do it... The president does not have the authority to simply declare that we must all now return to the way things were... But that doesn’t actually matter, because what Trump is planning isn’t an opening of the American economy. It’s a show in which he pretends to have opened the American economy.
Not everyone who works for Trump is spending all their waking hours planning this show. But even the ones who are concerned with policy have to work around a president who cares only about making sure the curtain rises on time, even if it means everyone in the theater getting sick.
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Trump has never respected any meaningful distinction between the federal government and the Trump Organization. He expects every federal employee, especially its law-enforcement agents, to advance his personal political agenda. He has functionally mixed its budget with his own by having the government pour money into his properties, and he has treated its official powers as if they are his own personal chits. The authority he has gained through the emergency response to the coronavirus has vastly expanded the potential for corruption, and every sign indicates that Trump is already engaging in systemic abuse.
Some of the corruption is lingering just below the surface. Trump is speaking constantly with corporate leaders, who can position themselves at the front of the line for federal contracts or relief payments. He supports bailouts for industries with a shaky claim to the public purse, like cruise lines, and has staunchly opposed any rescue for the United States Postal Service, which handles essential government communication. Trump... has been trying to force the post office to raise rates on Amazon, in retaliation for Jeff Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post. The economic crisis has put the post office on life support, giving Trump the leverage he wants to make it punish a detested rival.
Trump has treated the distribution of the federal government’s supply of emergency medical equipment like he is walking around the neighborhood with a money clip, pulling out bills and patting grateful recipients on the cheek... Trump routinely threatens Democratic governors not to complain about his mismanagement if they want help from Washington, conflating the authority of the government with his own authority. (“When they disrespect me, they are disrespecting our government.”) He has used the precious supply of ventilators as in-kind contributions, allowing endangered Republican allies... to hold them up as proof of their clout.
When Congress handed Trump control of half a trillion dollars in spending authority, it insisted on establishing some loose oversight requirements. Trump has diligently trashed them. When he signed the economic rescue bill, he added a statement that he would refuse to follow its express requirement that the inspector general report if the administration is withholding information from Congress. He quickly fired the inspector general who was tasked with overseeing the bailout fund, and replaced him with a member of his impeachment defense team. There is little mystery about Trump’s intention. He blurted it out: “I’ll be the oversight.”
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Trump is revisiting the pattern of abuse for which he was impeached. Trump believed he had a perfect right to take spending passed into law by Congress (in that case, military aid for Ukraine) and dangle it for a political benefit. He has correctly interpreted the near-unanimous acquittal vote by Republicans as a green light to repeat the crime. Congressional Republicans are communicating their open willingness to help Trump cover up his corruption... After Democrats announced a House committee to ensure stimulus funding is spent fairly, House Republican leader Tom Cole said it would have “unanimous or near-unanimous opposition” and thus “no legitimacy whatsoever.”
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A handful of categories of behavior by President Trump... have drawn condemnation or even forceful pushback by at least some Republicans... Trump’s corruption of government and open intent to turn government power into a tool of regime control is not in that category. Republicans have calculated, perhaps correctly, that it is in their interest for Trump to use emergency funds as campaign spending. He is not letting the crisis go to waste.
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Trump’s Easter had evidently been ruined by a damning 5,500-word New York Times investigation showing that Trump squandered precious time in January and February as numerous government figures were sounding the alarm about the coronavirus. With more than 23,000 American lives lost... he arrived in the West Wing briefing room determined to tell the world, or at least his base, that he was not to blame. Instead it was a new and bloody phase of his war against... the media. Families grieving loved ones lost to the virus were in for cold comfort here.
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The thin-skinned president lashed out at reporters, swiped at... Joe Biden and refused to accept that he had put a foot wrong.
So the story in the New York Times is a total fake. It’s a fake newspaper and they write fake stories. And someday, hopefully in five years when I’m not here, those papers are all going out of business because nobody’s going to read them.
With a dramatic flourish, the president ordered the briefing room lights dimmed... A campaign-style montage of video clips [was] shown on screens set up behind the podium. There was footage of doctors saying in January that the coronavirus did not pose an imminent threat, Trump declaring a national emergency, and Democratic governors praising him for providing federal assistance.
Jon Karl of ABC News asked in consternation, “Why did you feel the need to do that?” Trump replied:
Because we’re getting fake news and I like to have it corrected... Everything we did was right.
Over and over, Trump highlighted his decision to ban some flights from China in late January before there were any virus-related deaths confirmed in the U.S., even though nearly 400,000 people travelled to the U.S. from China before the restrictions were in place and 40,000 people have arrived there since.
The CBS News correspondent Paula Reid was having none of it and cut to the chase:
The argument is that you bought yourself some time... You didn’t use it to prepare hospitals. You didn’t use it to ramp up testing... Tens of thousands of Americans are dead.
Trump talked over her. “You’re so disgraceful.”
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Reid continued to push him on his inaction in February. Trump was unable to muster a reasonable response. It was a case study in how, when he loses an argument, his instinct is to attack the accuser. He trotted out his frayed, timeworn insult:
You know you’re a fake. Your whole network, the way you cover it, is fake.
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In a sane country, the president's approval rating would be cratering as people absorbed the... indisputable fact that this crisis is his fault. The evidence for that is not exactly hidden... Trump resisted taking any measures that would have slowed the spread of the virus for months, believing that people would never notice disease and death so long as he kept saying it wasn't real... Trump rejected or ignored warnings from health officials and blocked any useful response in favor of propaganda. Meanwhile, the coronavirus spread throughout the country, indifferent to Trump's apparent belief that lying about viruses make them go away. And yet, that baseline approval rating doesn't budge.
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These folks are encased in a Fox News bubble. Trump voters have been encouraged to reject legitimate news sources... and instead to get all their information from Trump-worshipping radio and cable hosts who spent months minimizing the virus and then switched seamlessly to swooning over how Trump will single-handedly defeat it... Of course, these folks also listen to Trump himself, a shameless liar who will declare victory no matter how badly he fails. But that explanation only goes so far, in no small part because the propaganda Trump voters inhale is so transparently stupid. Trump voters are clearly smart enough to tie their shoes and find their way to a voting booth, so it's unlikely that they are lacking the baseline mental acuity necessary to see through the ham-fisted manipulations on offer.
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The ugly truth is that Trump voters are playing along with these obvious lies because they cannot accept the alternative, which is to admit it was dumb and bad to vote for Trump in the first place.
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Admitting you're wrong is tough for anyone, because it's such a blow to the ego. But what the past few years have shown us is that the already difficult task of admitting you are wrong is even harder for conservatives... Just as Trump was warned for months about the coronavirus, conservatives were warned for literally a year and a half in 2015 and 2016 that voting for Trump... would result in disaster. To face reality now would mean giving into the twin humiliations of admitting they were wrong and the liberals were right, a double humiliation that is clearly too painful to bear.
Trump, being a terminal narcissist, understands the importance of ego preservation implicitly, which is why he often reframes criticism of his own failures as attacks on the people who voted for him. During impeachment, this worked beautifully. Republican voters could see as well as anyone that Trump was guilty... and that his blackmail scheme against the Ukrainian president was just the latest in a pattern of lifelong disregard for the law. But that 42% would rather deny the facts in front of their nose than admit that they were wrong and the Democrats were right.
Back then, it seemed the stakes couldn't get higher, but now they've been raised about as high as they can get, with the body count piling up and the economy in meltdown. In the face of all that, however, conservatives apparently continue to believe that saving face matters more than anything.
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