Handling the coronavirus crisis

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According to columnist David Lurie, writing for the Daily Beast, Donald Trump’s purge of inspector generals in the government is an attempt to make sure that he is not be subjected to any embarrassing reports or investigations before the November election. As Lurie notes, the president has enlisted former bodyman John McEntee, who was previously booted from the White House by former Chief of Staff John Kelly, to purge critics and those considered not loyal to Trump from their posts, and that inspector generals are at the top of the list. “In the midst of a deadly pandemic, Donald Trump has expanded his war on oversight by attacking the governments’ inspectors general, compounding the damage already done by his unprecedented stonewalling of congressional oversight investigations,” Lurie wrote, before adding that Trump and McEntee are dead set on “targeting IGs as part of a broader effort to purge officials who aren’t sufficiently personally loyal to Trump.” “That effort might help Trump delay any formal reviews of his failed leadership during the pandemic, or of his administrations’ disbursement of trillions in coronavirus-related spending, until after the November election,” he continued before highlighting the firing of Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general for turning over to Congress the whistleblower report on Trump’s attempts to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden.

Trump is working behind the scenes to cripple any investigations before the November election: columnist – Alternet.org

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The first COVID-19 case in the U.S. was detected in Seattle on Jan. 30 - the same day South Korea had its first case. The South Koreans built up their own testing regime at break-neck speed and were soon able to test 10,000 suspected cases a day. Trump, on the other hand, claimed on Jan. 26 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, "We have it under control, it’s going to be just fine.” Nothing could have been further from the truth. At the time, the CDC decided to develop its own test for the coronavirus rather than using a functioning one from the WHO. The test quickly turned out to be faulty, and as a result, weeks went by without anyone being able to determine how widely the disease had already spread in the U.S.

On Jan. 30, the WHO warned of a possible global coronavirus pandemic. The same day, at a campaign rally in Michigan, Trump said, "We’ve very little problem (sic) in this country at the moment.” In early February, some state governors began requesting help from Washington, mainly in the form of protective clothing and ventilators from the Strategic National Stockpile. The national reserve was set up in 1999, overseen by some 200 employees at several secret locations. But the reserve has never been properly replenished since the H1N1 pandemic, the swine flu of 2009. 

On Feb. 5, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar requested $4 billion from the White House to order supplies needed in the battle against the pandemic. But Azar didn’t get that money because Trump’s advisers still considered warnings about the virus to be exaggerated – and the president obviously feared that bad news would send stock prices plummeting. Trump also refused to make recommendations for dealing with the epidemic.

On Feb. 25, Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans reached their climax, with tens of thousands of drinking and partying merrymakers winding their way through the city’s streets. Much like the après-ski bars in the Austrian town of Ischgl, which was one of the main infection corridors that brought the disease to Germany and other Western European countries, the carnival  celebration was the ideal breeding ground for the pathogen,. "We didn’t even think of cancelling Mardi Gras,” says Cynthia Lee Sheng, the president of Jefferson Parish, the country that borders New Orleans. "We knew the virus existed in other parts of the world, but we thought it could be contained in the U.S." It was a misunderstanding, and it was largely Trump’s fault. Within days of when the celebrating throngs were working their way through Bourbon Street, the president told people in Washington to think of it as being a bit like the flu. Two days later, the president uttered the ultimate expression of his negligence in handling the crisis. "It’s going to disappear. One day – it’s like a miracle – it will disappear.” Today, Jefferson Parish County has more deaths per capita than New York City. And like almost everywhere else in the U.S., it is hitting people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder hardest. Even before the pandemic, Americans living under the poverty line were five times at greater risk of disease than wealthy people.

The American Patient: How Trump Is Fueling a Corona Disaster - DER SPIEGEL

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For several months, President Donald Trump and his officials have cast a fog of promises meant to reassure a country in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic. Trump and his team haven’t delivered on critical ones. They talk numbers. Bewildering numbers about masks on the way. About tests being taken. About ships sailing to the rescue, breathing machines being built and shipped, field hospitals popping up, aircraft laden with supplies from abroad, dollars flowing to crippled businesses. Piercing that fog is the bottom-line reality that Americans are going without the medical supplies and much of the financial help they most need from the government at the very time they need it most — and were told they would have it.

Trump leaves trail of unmet promises in coronavirus response | PBS NewsHour Weekend

• Promises, promises...
  
• An in-depth look at the promises made about PPE, ventilators, tests, etc.
  

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An examination reveals the president was warned about the potential for a pandemic but that internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts led to a halting response.

He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus - The New York Times

• Extensive NYT investigation uncovering multiple moments of dithering and looking the other way, like the following:
  

President Donald Trump was informed in late January of a memo written by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, warning that ‘half a million American souls’ could die of coronavirus, The New York Times reported Saturday. Trump has denied he saw the memo at the time. The Times also reported that Trump was displeased that Navarro had put the information in writing.

According to The Times, aides discussed the memo with Trump, and he was displeased Navarro put the information in writing. Navarro also wrote a second memo on February 23 warning that up to “1 [to] 2 million souls” could die of the virus, according to Axios. Just one day later, Trump tweeted that the coronavirus was “very much under control in the USA.”

Trump learned of a memo in January warning 'half a million American souls' could die of coronavirus, and he was displeased his adviser put it in writing

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As the coronavirus pandemic spreads, new details continue to emerge about the way President Donald Trump mishandled the United States’ response. An investigation by the New York Times has revealed that experts and administration officials tried to warn Trump of the serious nature of the coronavirus pandemic early on. Alerts from high-ranking government experts began as far back as January, six weeks before his administration finally sprang into action on March 16, when he issued concrete guidelines for the public.

The report exhaustively outlines numerous ways in which Trump avoided listening to government authorities as they proposed strategies for dealing with the pandemic. It also details an administration mired in political bickering, which hamstrung officials at every phase of their response. The report prompted epidemiologist Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to respond that “obviously” lives could have been saved if the government had taken the warnings seriously..

The report paints a portrait of Trump as being swayed by things like petty politics, one-upmanship, advice from his uninformed business associates, and his annoyance at inconsequential conspiracy theories, rather than the strenuous and sustained advice of experts — most of which he ignored for weeks. The delay resulted in a lack of effective quarantining measures, a dearth of testing centers and equipment, a failure to reallocate existing resources, and widespread confusion about how seriously the public should be taking the disease. Here are a few of the most revealing warnings that Trump ignored or dismissed.

Trump was telling officials to stop panicking — even after he’d banned travel from China
The first reported instance of a Covid-19 case in the US was confirmed on January 21. On January 31, Trump announced a restriction on all incoming travel from China, effective on February 2. But according to the Times, even though his own proclamation declared that “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has determined that the virus presents a serious public health threat,” Trump himself was simultaneously telling administration officials not to “panic” over Covid-19. Trump reportedly delivered this statement to his own health and human services secretary, Alex Azar, after Azar tried to warn him that Covid-19 could escalate into a pandemic, the night before Trump issued the ban. It was his second such warning, but Trump was dismissive:

Mr. Azar was blunt, warning that the virus could develop into a pandemic and arguing that China should be criticized for failing to be transparent.
Mr. Trump rejected the idea of criticizing China, saying the country had enough to deal with. And if the president’s decision on the travel restrictions suggested that he fully grasped the seriousness of the situation, his response to Mr. Azar indicated otherwise.
Stop panicking, Mr. Trump told him.

Trump would repeatedly display this attitude in public throughout the pandemic’s spread. Nearly a month later, he continued to claim to reporters that the coronavirus would simply vanish by April: “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

Trump ignored early urgent advice to institute social distancing guidelines, in part because he was throwing a political tantrum
Multiple groups, working together and independently, attempted to alert Trump to the need for extreme action, taken early. As early as January 29, Trump received a memo from trade official Peter Navarro urging serious action to fight the virus or “leave Americans defenseless.” On February 14, another memo circulated by a group of administration experts urged social distancing, quarantining, and preparedness.

Political squabbling over China meant the earliest warnings about the coronavirus went dismissed while conspiracy theories were taken seriously
Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger had been investigating news of the outbreak since early January, suspecting correctly that China had restricted reports of the outbreak’s severity and spread.
But his efforts to get news and updates about the outbreak through to senior officials and health administration officials constantly met with political obstacles. Health officials downplayed his information and politicians attempted to spin the information to benefit the US in its ongoing complicated relationship with China.

Trump ignored coronavirus warnings from experts for months - Vox

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• As the coronavirus outbreak worsened, several public-health experts both within and outside of the federal government sounded the alarm about the severity of the crisis.
  
• Over the weekend, The New York Times published about 80 pages of emails showing how the nation’s top experts were expressing serious concerns and frustrations about the government’s lack of a clear, coordinated mitigation strategy as the outbreak unfolded.
  
• “We are making every misstep leaders initially made in table-tops at the outset of pandemic planning in 2006,” an infectious-diseases specialist wrote on March 12, adding, “We have thrown 15 years of institutional learning out the window.”
  

'We have thrown 15 years of institutional learning out the window': Leaked emails show top public-health experts raised alarm about the Trump administration's botched coronavirus response

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Exactly one month ago today, Donald Trump stood in the White House Rose Garden and announced, with a row of beaming corporate CEOs behind him, a new “Google”-built website for COVID-19 tracking and testing and a new “nationwide” partnership with companies like Walmart, Target, and CVS to open COVID-19 testing sites. The Google claim turned out to be an invention on Trump’s part, possibly the result of his inability to retain and process any information that is not about himself.

The partnership to open testing centers now looks to have been a lie as well. By April 1, two weeks after Trump’s emergency announcement, the grand total of testing facilities in those corporate locations was five. Five, total. For the whole nation. The administration pulled funding for the program that Friday, saying the testing centers would be “transitioning” to state-run projects. The grand total of testing sites now, one month later? A National Public Radio report says the total has increased from five to eight..

Trump’s signature effort to contain the virus was a “travel ban” from China that was implemented only after the virus had already entered America and which contained such broad exemptions as to be nearly useless. (The most severe outbreak, in New York City, has been traced instead to Europe.) Shortly afterward, the administration shipped nearly 18 tons of medical supplies to China—the very supplies that government experts had long warned would quickly run out in a U.S. pandemic, and the supplies that experts were already begging the government to ramp up production of.

Trump’s grand promises for the pandemic response are now in ruins – Alternet.org

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President Donald Trump delivered another litany of false and misleading claims on Monday at a White House coronavirus briefing during which he repeatedly accused the media of dishonesty. Trump delivered an indignant screed about claims that he was slow in responding to the coronavirus outbreak, repeatedly citing the travel restrictions on China he announced in late January and began in early February. Yet his defense did not address his public downplaying of the virus into March, how his administration was slow to deploy the tests experts believe might have helped contain the outbreak, or how the administration waited critical weeks to make large orders of critical equipment.

Fact check: A list of false claims from Trump's bitter coronavirus briefing - CNNPolitics

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman accused President Trump of using “misleading” audio of her coronavirus reporting during a White House video at Monday’s press briefing meant to defend his response to the pandemic. In the audio clip from her late March appearance on the Times podcast “The Daily,” which was played as part of an administration video of generally positive news coverage, Haberman said the president was “widely criticized” for stopping flights from China from entering the U.S., adding he was accused of “xenophobia” and racism. “At the end of the day, it was probably effective, because it did actually take a pretty aggressive measure against the spread of the virus,” the White House correspondent said.  “Their use of the audio is misleading," Haberman tweeted. "I went on to say I said he treated that travel limitation as a Mission Accomplished moment,” she posted.  “And then he did basically nothing for over a month. Which was our story yesterday,” she added in another tweet.

NYT's Haberman hits Trump over 'misleading' audio on her coronavirus reporting | TheHill

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Trump said at a White House briefing that the United States would suspend funding to the organization while officials conduct a review “to assess the World Health Organization’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.” The president criticized the WHO for opposing large-scale travel restrictions and accused it of failing to quickly vet and share accurate information on COVID-19. “The WHO’s attack on travel restrictions put political correctness above life-saving measures,” Trump said in the Rose Garden. “The reality is that the WHO failed to adequately obtain, vet and share information in a timely and transparent fashion.”

Trump to halt WHO funding amid review | TheHill

So Trump is suspending WHO funding because they were touting Chinese transparency and not fast enough warning for the pandemic..

• This is exactly what Trump himself has done
  
• He has praised Chinese reaction and transparency no less than 12 times in January and February
  
• He also praised the WHO
  
• He could have taken the WHO tests in January
  
• Withholding funding for the WHO will create problem in developing countries (which are dependent on WHO resources) in the middle of a pandemic..
  

A CNN KFile review of Trump's public statements identified at least 12 occasions in which the President praised or projected confidence about China's response to coronavirus.

Trump repeatedly praised China's response to coronavirus in February - CNNPolitics

• Sourced with links..
  

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As millions of Americans woke up to $1,200 checks in their bank accounts, some of the nation’s richest taxpayers learned they were about to receive a bit of relief as well — about $1.7m each, to be exact. Nearly 43,000 millionaires across the country would soon profit off a loophole adapted from the Republican tax code overhaul of 2017, which allows certain business owners to significantly reduce their tax liability by temporarily suspending the limit of deductions they can place against non-business income.

The loophole was included as a provision in the sweeping $2.2tn Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, according to a report published by the Joint Commission on Taxation. Democrats who ordered the report have since accused Republicans of having “wrongly seized on this health emergency to reward ultrarich beneficiaries, likely including the Trump family”, and called for the tax break to be immediately repealed.

The Joint Commission on Taxation said that a staggering “82 per cent of the benefits of the policy go to about 43,000 taxpayers who earn more than $1m annually”. Those 43,000 taxpayers eligible for the loophole would receive an average windfall of nearly $1.7m — a figure confirmed by the commission’s calculations and first reported by Forbes.

Meanwhile, some of those wealthy Americans earning more than $1m annually may receive far greater than $1.7 million, as the provision can be retroactively placed “so losses in 2018 and 2019 can be ‘carried back’ against the past five years”, according to the policy.eive first $1,200 stimulus checks with more on the way

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), who commissioned the report along with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), slammed his Republican colleagues over the tax break in a statement alleging the loophole was “so generous that its total cost is more than total new funding for all hospitals in America and more than the total provided to all state and local governments”.

Millionaires receive $1.7m in coronavirus relief as most taxpayers get $1,200 payments thanks to hidden Republican loophole | The Independent

• Jaw dropping..