The Official Trump is Doing Awesome Thread

[ChumpDumper]

Jesus.
1238602327847833602

[Blake]

let's be civil bro. i don't mean to call you a bitch blake and i'm sorry you feel the need to be smug but maybe one day we'll both get over the hump. :tu

"You're smug but let's be civil"

Lol go fuck yourself, asshole

[koriwhat]

"You're smug but let's be civil"

Lol go fuck yourself, asshole

:lmao

[Blake]

:lmao

:lmao

[Chris]

https://twitter.com/Solmemes1/status/1238889251015663617?s=19

lmao

[boutons_deux]

(Obama) Judge Blocks Trump Rule

That Would Have Kicked 700,000 Off Food Stamps During a Pandemic

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/injunction-snap-rule-change-coronavirus-pandemic.html

Chances are excellent that Leo Leonard/Moscow Mitch ABA-unqualified political hack judge would have not blocked the rule.

Will Barr appeal, go judge shopping?

One of the Repug cases before SCOTUS would block such judicial rulings.

Repugs want their kingly, autocratic President and his entire Exec branch (aka the entire govt) to be untouchable by Congress or the Judiciary

[Blake]

https://twitter.com/Solmemes1/status/1238889251015663617?s=19

lmao

If real that's about as stupid as getting a pro Trump tat

[Spurtacular]

https://twitter.com/Solmemes1/status/1238889251015663617?s=19

lmao

That guy would fit in with the Chumpettes just fine.

[Spurtacular]

:cry If real that's about as stupid as getting a pro Trump tat

:lol "If real"

[Spurtacular]

"You're smug but let's be civil"

Lol go fuck yourself, asshole

Fuck smug people! Fuck em all!

[Blake]

That guy would fit in with the Chumpettes just fine.

So you would flirt with him too if it was a him

[Spurtacular]

So you would flirt with him too if it was a him

:lol That you've clung so hard to this trash defense mechanism.

[Th'Pusher]

https://twitter.com/Solmemes1/status/1238889251015663617?s=19

lmao

Would kw refuse to apply that tattoo or would he sell his soul for the $80?

[ElNono]

https://twitter.com/Solmemes1/status/1238889251015663617?s=19

lmao

pretty bad. calf tats tho

[Chris]

pretty bad. calf tats tho

”You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor tattoo any marks on you: I am the Lord.”
-Leviticus 19:28

[Blake]

:lol That you've clung so hard to this trash defense mechanism.

You make it real easy for everyone to think you're very gay.

[Blake]

”You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor tattoo any marks on you: I am the Lord.”
-Leviticus 19:28

Lol Chris calling kw a sinner

[Spurtacular]

You make it real easy for everyone to think you're very gay.

I'm sure it's really easy for you to have your gay thoughts. :lmao

[Blake]

I'm sure it's really easy for you to have your gay thoughts. :lmao

You literally express yours here every day. Literally. Nobody even has to wonder.

[Spurtacular]

You literally express yours here every day. Literally. Nobody even has to wonder.

You simply utilized the defense mechanism that Chump gave you.

:lmao Programmed cuckold

[pgardn]

”You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor tattoo any marks on you: I am the Lord.”
-Leviticus 19:28

Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material. 19:19

Do not round the corners of your head. 19:27

Is it any wonder Monty Python made a killing using Leviticus parody.
Damn if I will round my square head with a chisel.

[Blake]

Hur dur

[ElNono]

”You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor tattoo any marks on you: I am the Lord.”
-Leviticus 19:28

^ fake christian

[Chris]

^ fake christian

okie boomer

[ElNono]

okie boomer

lol so wrong, fake news, per par

[Chris]

lol so wrong, fake news, per par

whatever you say, boomer

[DMC]

”You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor tattoo any marks on you: I am the Lord.”
-Leviticus 19:28

Trump isn't dead.

[Thread]

”You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor tattoo any marks on you: I am the Lord.”
-Leviticus 19:28

Tell it, Chris. Proselytize!!!

[ElNono]

whatever you say, boomer

that's telling me :lol

[pgardn]

Tell it, Chris. Proselytize!!!

I bet the Old Testament Leviticus will help us to avoid rounding our heads as well.
Prudent words for these times.

Honestly Leviticus should be used for a good laugh. It has some obvious dietary restrictions because of the diseases caused at that time. But the others are wildly strange.

“Do do not feed on the eight legged beast that stings ye tongue so that it swells to the size of ye leg.”

Oh thanks for that advice; I was just pouring milk over a bowl of scorpions for breakfast.

Christ.... Chris...

[picnroll]

”You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor tattoo any marks on you: I am the Lord.”
-Leviticus 19:28

Lord? And here I just thought you were an asshole.

[Chris]

that's telling me :lol

dummy

https://twitter.com/neekolul/status/1234601269127458817?s=19

[boutons_deux]

White House morale ‘bottomed out’ after aides realized Trump’s address to the nation made things worse

The report goes on to state that morale at the White House “bottomed out” after the speech, forcing Trump staffers to scramble to put together the president’s Rose Garden speech on Friday where he declared a national emergency

“The crushing response on Thursday prompted the White House to schedule Friday’s press conference in the Rose Garden, a favorite venue of the president thanks to its natural lighting and the more free-wheeling format of a back-and-forth press conference,

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/white-house-morale-bottomed-out-after-aides-realized-trumps-address-to-the-nation-made-things-worse-report/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29 (https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/white-house-morale-bottomed-out-after-aides-realized-trumps-address-to-the-nation-made-things-worse-report/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29)

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/14/how-trump-changed-course-on-coronavirus-129528

corrupt Jared and ogre Stephen Miller wrote the speech, old political aces with just the right touch

[Thread]

White House morale ‘bottomed out’ after aides realized Trump’s address to the nation made things worse

The report goes on to state that morale at the White House “bottomed out” after the speech, forcing Trump staffers to scramble to put together the president’s Rose Garden speech on Friday where he declared a national emergency

“The crushing response on Thursday prompted the White House to schedule Friday’s press conference in the Rose Garden, a favorite venue of the president thanks to its natural lighting and the more free-wheeling format of a back-and-forth press conference,

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/white-house-morale-bottomed-out-after-aides-realized-trumps-address-to-the-nation-made-things-worse-report/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29 (https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/white-house-morale-bottomed-out-after-aides-realized-trumps-address-to-the-nation-made-things-worse-report/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29)

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/14/how-trump-changed-course-on-coronavirus-129528

corrupt Jared and ogre Stephen Miller wrote the speech, old political aces with just the right touch

...so the (sources) state.

Must be swell not to have to show your work.

[ElNono]

dummy

https://twitter.com/neekolul/status/1234601269127458817?s=19

:lmao says dummy and posts a tweet... cool story bro

[Chris]

poor fella :lol

[ElNono]

^ lots of vitamin I on det post :lol

[boutons_deux]

This judicial block of environment destruction is precisely why the oligarchy has polluted the Federal judiciary with rightwing political hacks

Alaska judge stalls logging in Tongass National Forest

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/487286-alaska-judge-stalls-logging-in-tongass-national-forest (https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/487286-alaska-judge-stalls-logging-in-tongass-national-forest)

a Repug judge would have permitted the logging destruction of Tongass

[LkrFan]

https://twitter.com/PalmerReport/status/1239686280776163329?s=19

What a racist thug :lol

[LkrFan]

that's telling me :lol

:lmao

[LkrFan]

https://twitter.com/jennerific713/status/1239686040958402563?s=09

Trump lies are costing lives. SMH

[Winehole23]

hadn't this guy already been pink slipped?


McEntee's return to the White House has roiled the administration with some officials criticizing the former Trump campaign staffer for what they see as an effort to stock the administration with his friends, including at least three college seniors.https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/03/17/dale-cabaniss-high-school-white-house-134541

[Chris]

https://twitter.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1240272032765542406?s=19

[Thread]

https://twitter.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1240272032765542406?s=19

..."I just am enraged that he didn't do all of this sooner."..."But, that unsavory business aside, I swear, on the souls of my grandchildren, I will not be the one to break the peace we have made here to today. Come, Barzini, come Tataligia, Philip, let us hug & then luncheon at Sardi's."

[Spurs Homer]

https://twitter.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1240272032765542406?s=19

even Cultists are starving to hear dear leader praised constantly...

pathetic

[boutons_deux]

Bashing probe of US war crimes,

Mike Pompeo threatens family of

International Criminal Court staff

with consequences

Pompeo told (https://www.state.gov/secretary-michael-r-pompeo-remarks-to-the-press-6/) reporters the ICC is “a so-called court which is revealing itself to be a nakedly political body.”

Pompeo renewed his vocal disdain for the court, calling it “an embarrassment.”
“As I said the last time I stood before you,

we oppose any effort by the ICC to exercise jurisdiction over U.S. personnel,” Pompeo told reporters.

“We will not tolerate its inappropriate and unjust attempts to investigate or prosecute Americans.”
“I’m examining this information now and considering

what the United States’ next steps ought to be with respect

to these individuals and

all those who are putting Americans at risk.”

identify those responsible for this partisan investigation and their family members

who may want to travel to the United States

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/bashing-probe-of-us-war-crimes-mike-pompeo-threatens-family-of-icc-staff-with-consequences/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3989

"Why Do They Hate Us?"

[koriwhat]

Bashing probe of US war crimes,

Mike Pompeo threatens family of

International Criminal Court staff

with consequences

Pompeo told (https://www.state.gov/secretary-michael-r-pompeo-remarks-to-the-press-6/) reporters the ICC is “a so-called court which is revealing itself to be a nakedly political body.”

Pompeo renewed his vocal disdain for the court, calling it “an embarrassment.”
“As I said the last time I stood before you,

we oppose any effort by the ICC to exercise jurisdiction over U.S. personnel,” Pompeo told reporters.

“We will not tolerate its inappropriate and unjust attempts to investigate or prosecute Americans.”
“I’m examining this information now and considering

what the United States’ next steps ought to be with respect

to these individuals and

all those who are putting Americans at risk.”

identify those responsible for this partisan investigation and their family members

who may want to travel to the United States

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/bashing-probe-of-us-war-crimes-mike-pompeo-threatens-family-of-icc-staff-with-consequences/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3989

"Why Do They Hate Us?"


you're a far left retard... tim pool, of all people, believes rawstory.com to be a shit outlet too and yet here you are peddling their bullshit daily. you post blocks of their crap which no one gives a fuck to read. how silly...

[boutons_deux]

Crushed by reality, Trash, KAC, and Fox's BULLSHIT war on the seriousness of covid-19 has been lost.

Trash and Fox are now bullshtting that Trash is a "war president"

[Thread]

Crushed by reality, Trash, KAC, and Fox's BULLSHIT war on the seriousness of covid-19 has been lost.

Trash and Fox are now bullshtting that Trash is a "war president"




Though it was Obama who denied Bin due process & shot him to death on spec.

[boutons_deux]

"
C
attle farmers who have supported the U.S. president are now opposing his decision to lift the ban on Brazilian beef."


“He’s doing a fantastic job. … Brazil loves him, and the USA loves him,” :lol LIE

Trump told reporters, lavishing praise on Bolsonaro.

the U.S. in late February lifted a two-year-old ban on imports of fresh Brazilian beef (https://www.ozy.com/the-new-and-the-next/bolsonaros-beef-with-the-amazon-forces-u-s-meat-firms-to-change-course/96641/).

But by opening up an alternative market — the U.S. — for Brazilian beef, Trump has upset the American cattle lobby that’s particularly influential in several traditionally red states, and he did it in an election year.

“NCBA has serious concerns :lol about the re-entry of Brazilian beef to the U.S. market,”

The United States Cattlemen’s Association has said it was “stunned” by the reversal of the ban.

Brazil’s government heavily subsidizes its domestic cattle industry, which allows Brazil to sell beef in the international market at lower prices than other countries like the U.S. and Australia.

Allowing the beef imports “will pit America’s family cattle farmer and ranchers against Brazil’s $1.2 billion in subsidies to its cattle industry,”

worry about America’s ability to actually regulate the quality of Brazilian beef

and about whether consumers will be able to tell the difference, since current laws don’t require finished products sold at retail stores to mention the country of origin of the meat.

eight of the 10 biggest cattle-producing states in the U.S. voted for him in 2016:

Texas,
Nebraska,
Kansas,
Oklahoma,
Missouri,
Iowa,
South Dakota and
Wisconsin.

Japan and South Korea, the two biggest markets for U.S. beef, are both badly affected by the coronavirus.

That means American beef producers can ill afford losing a slice of their domestic market to Brazil.

Trump might yet need to choose between Bolsonaro and the beef industry in the U.S.

https://www.ozy.com/around-the-world/butterfly-effect-can-coronavirus-scarred-brazilian-beef-burn-trump/287748/?utm_term=OZY&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DailyDose%20%282020-03-17%2016:12:29%29&utm_content=Final (https://www.ozy.com/around-the-world/butterfly-effect-can-coronavirus-scarred-brazilian-beef-burn-trump/287748/?utm_term=OZY&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DailyDose%20%282020-03-17%2016:12:29%29&utm_content=Final)

[boutons_deux]

More LYING to protect himself

Trump Is Trying To Cover Up How Many Americans Are Filing Unemployment Claims


“Trump administration is asking state labor officials to

delay releasing the precise number of unemployment claims they are fielding.”

https://www.politicususa.com/2020/03/19/trump-trying-to-cover-up-how-many-americans-are-filing-for-unemployment-claims.html (https://www.politicususa.com/2020/03/19/trump-trying-to-cover-up-how-many-americans-are-filing-for-unemployment-claims.html)

[Isitjustme?]

1240819341198688257

[boutons_deux]

What's on Billy Barr's corrupt mind in the middle of national crisis? More raping of the Constituion

Left & Right Resoundingly React to

DOJ Seeking Power to Detain ‘Indefinitely Without Trial’ During Emergency:

‘HELL NO!’

https://www.mediaite.com/online/left-right-resoundingly-react-to-doj-seeking-power-to-detain-indefinitely-without-trial-during-emergency-hell-no/

[ducks]

Fauci says 'there isn't, fundamentally, a difference' between his view and Trump's on coronavirus
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/22/politics/fauci-trump-coronavirus-treatments/index.html

[Thread]

Fauci says 'there isn't, fundamentally, a difference' between his view and Trump's on coronavirus
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/22/politics/fauci-trump-coronavirus-treatments/index.html


Tell it, ducks. Testify!!!

Though I was glad to see that little squirt didn't show up today.

[boutons_deux]

Trump ‘didn’t know people died from the flu.’ :lol

It killed his grandfather. :lol

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/03/07/flu-trump-grandfather-death-coronavirus/

[ducks]

Dual Harris polls released Friday revealed between March 14th and 18th, the president’s approval rating jumped 4 percent. Additionally, the approval rating for his handling of the coronavirus also jumped from 51 to 56 percent.

According to the data, 61 percent of Americans trust the White House to provide accurate information regarding the outbreak. The polls were conducted just two days apart, showing a rapid boost of positivity among voters.

[Thread]

Dual Harris polls released Friday revealed between March 14th and 18th, the president’s approval rating jumped 4 percent. Additionally, the approval rating for his handling of the coronavirus also jumped from 51 to 56 percent.

According to the data, 61 percent of Americans trust the White House to provide accurate information regarding the outbreak. The polls were conducted just two days apart, showing a rapid boost of positivity among voters.

+ he doesn't grouse about us hitting the beaches in Florida, or, Central Park in NYC.

[Blake]

Trump ‘didn’t know people died from the flu.’ :lol

It killed his grandfather. :lol

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/03/07/flu-trump-grandfather-death-coronavirus/

Goddam

[Blake]

Dual Harris polls released Friday revealed between March 14th and 18th, the president’s approval rating jumped 4 percent. Additionally, the approval rating for his handling of the coronavirus also jumped from 51 to 56 percent.

According to the data, 61 percent of Americans trust the White House to provide accurate information regarding the outbreak. The polls were conducted just two days apart, showing a rapid boost of positivity among voters.

There's this too:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/21/politics/trump-vs-biden-poll-of-the-week/index.html

[ducks]

Goddam

He never heard of those number 36k
Did you know 36k died of the flu last year before this started?

[ducks]

Trump ‘didn’t know people died from the flu.’ :lol

It killed his grandfather. :lol

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/03/07/flu-trump-grandfather-death-coronavirus/

What a liberal false title
He never heard of those numbers
Like most people did not know 36k died
Of common flu last year before this started

[Blake]

"Trump is now averaging about 57 false claims per week since we started counting at CNN on July 8, 2019. From that date through March 15, he has made 2,062 false claims in all...."

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/22/politics/fact-check-trump-coronavirus-false-claims-march/index.html

33 false claims this month about coronavirus

[DMX7]

What a liberal false title
He never heard of those numbers
Like most people did not know 36k died
Of common flu last year before this started
I knew. I think most people who know things knew a lot of people died from the common flu.

[pgardn]

Fauci says 'there isn't, fundamentally, a difference' between his view and Trump's on coronavirus
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/22/politics/fauci-trump-coronavirus-treatments/index.html

Good.

Keep saying this and try to get Trump to stfu on his ignorance.

[pgardn]

What a liberal false title
He never heard of those numbers
Like most people did not know 36k died
Of common flu last year before this started

From the post:

I would’ve said, ‘Does anybody die from the flu? I didn’t know people died from the flu.’ …


So I don’t get it ducks, what is the problem here?

[Winehole23]

ducks thinks we're all as ignorant as the US President.

[ducks]

ducks thinks we're all as ignorant as the US President.

You knew 36k died from the flu last year ?
Where in the hell was your outrage ?

[pgardn]

You knew 36k died from the flu last year ?
Where in the hell was your outrage ?

I knew people died from the flu.
I bet you did to ducks because we had a vaccine thread on it.
I would vote for you, over him.

The point was he did not know anyone died from the flu.
This is our fckn president. Where the fck do you live for 70+ years and not know this?

[Winehole23]

You knew 36k died from the flu last year ?
Where in the hell was your outrage ?I would have guessed a little more -- flu is quite the killer, even with a yearly vaccine.

Focusing on mortality levels somewhat misses the point during the outbreak of a novel pathogen. What's most dangerous about COVID-19 isn't so much the rate of mortality as it's infectiousness. If the caseload exceeds our capacity to treat patients, excess death for all sorts of unrelated things starts happening

[Blake]

You knew 36k died from the flu last year ?
Where in the hell was your outrage ?

Wrong question

[Chris]

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1241929664987148289?s=19

[Winehole23]

Yes, Donald Trump looks at coverage of the the qorst global pandemic in generations and thinks it's all about him. Also equates calling out his lies, obfuscation and his piss poor leadership to destruction of the country itself. L'etat, c'est moi.

Says more about him than the media, tbh.

[Blake]

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1241929664987148289?s=19

Christ when is that piece of shit gonna stop with the whining about media and stand up and be a godam leader. We've got no time for this shit.

[ducks]

Lol biden and 44 did nothing tell 1k died from swine flu
But 45 is not doing anything


Lol

[boutons_deux]

Lol biden and 44 did nothing tell 1k died from swine flu


You Lie

[ChumpDumper]

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1241929664987148289?s=19Quit whining and get to work, fatty.

[boutons_deux]

Trash didn't even know the Spanish flu killed his grandfather Trump.

Trash's "knowledge" stops at the end of his nose

[Winehole23]

Lol biden and 44 did nothing tell 1k died from swine flu
But 45 is not doing anything


LolDeclared a public health emergency in April 2009 when there were 20 diagnosed cases and zero confirmed deaths.

Tested one million people for it in approximately one month.

The H1N1 swine flu started on a US pig farm, but you don't see anybody calling it the American flu or singling out pork producers for revenge.

[Winehole23]

By contrast, Trump is trying to kick 700,000 people off SNAP and repeal the ACA in the middle of a pandemic.

Put together with COVID-19 undertesting (a political decision) and today's loud cries to get back to work, it sure looks like the settled policy of the Trump Adminstration is mass death to save Wall St.

[Winehole23]

Lagniappe for those who claim we can't afford the damage to the economy:

Life expectancy in the US went *up* during the Great Depression.

[Winehole23]

Fauci MIA at today's presser, but Barr is there.

[boutons_deux]

Lagniappe for those who claim we can't afford the damage to the economy:

Life expectancy in the US went *up* during the Great Depression.

parallel increase in health under Nazi semi-starvation regime in, IIRC, Scandinavia, NL.

[boutons_deux]

Fauci MIA at today's presser, but Barr is there.

not an accident, and probably Barr-ed from giving his own news conferences and TV appearances.

[Thread]

Fauci MIA at today's presser, but Barr is there.

I'd fire his ass if he already ain't done so.

But, sadly the old man has retreated a bit now. No more "Chinese" virus.

(They) got him snortin'.

[Thread]

Declared a public health emergency in April 2009 when there were 20 diagnosed cases and zero confirmed deaths.

Tested one million people for it in approximately one month.

The H1N1 swine flu started on a US pig farm, but you don't see anybody calling it the American flu or singling out pork producers for revenge.

Nonetheless, 12.5 thousand Americans lost their life under Obama's watch.

[boutons_deux]

Nonetheless, 12.5 thousand Americans lost their life under Obama's watch.

you can't win them all against nature, but at least Obama's team Played Hard and saved many more lives than were lost.

otoh, with Trash's kakistocracy,

you ain't seen nuthin, yet

[Thread]

you can't win them all against nature, but at least Obama's team Played Hard and saved many more lives than were lost.

otoh, with Trash's kakistocracy,

you ain't seen nuthin, yet

When I get to 12.5k+1 you'll win. Until then, I win.

Let us proceed...

[Blake]

I'd fire his ass if he already ain't done so.

But, sadly the old man has retreated a bit now. No more "Chinese" virus.

(They) got him snortin'.

Call it Chinese Virus later if Trump wants. More important things on his plate right now.

[boutons_deux]

Trump has a bizarre answer as to why Dr. Fauci was not at coronavirus briefing:

‘He doesn’t not disagree with me’

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/trump-has-a-bizarre-answer-as-to-why-dr-fauci-was-not-at-coronavirus-briefing-he-doesnt-not-disagree-with-me/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29 (https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/trump-has-a-bizarre-answer-as-to-why-dr-fauci-was-not-at-coronavirus-briefing-he-doesnt-not-disagree-with-me/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29)

[Thread]

Call it Chinese Virus later if Trump wants. More important things on his plate right now.

Then he should've just referred to it as the "silent enemy" today. One would think he'd have learned after 4 years that showing weakness, or, retreat will do nothing but spill his blood into the water. (They) don't want nor care about being right. They want him o.u.t., out.

[Thread]

Trump has a bizarre answer as to why Dr. Fauci was not at coronavirus briefing:

‘He doesn’t not disagree with me’

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/trump-has-a-bizarre-answer-as-to-why-dr-fauci-was-not-at-coronavirus-briefing-he-doesnt-not-disagree-with-me/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29 (https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/trump-has-a-bizarre-answer-as-to-why-dr-fauci-was-not-at-coronavirus-briefing-he-doesnt-not-disagree-with-me/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29)


He aint been there 2 straight days. He should fire his ass for insubordination, send him to the CNN grn rm. & attendant buffet. He can commiserate with Mooch & the Clapper.

[Winehole23]

Coincidence I'm sure

1242229985139724290

[Winehole23]

Nonetheless, 12.5 thousand Americans lost their life under Obama's watch.

Yep.

Imagine how bad it would have been with the old man in charge.

[Thread]

Yep.

Imagine how bad it would have been with the old man in charge.

Probably 540.

tee, hee.

[Splits]

He aint been there 2 straight days. He should fire his ass for insubordination, send him to the CNN grn rm. & attendant buffet. He can commiserate with Mooch & the Clapper.

1241104227138777092

1242410270292692993

1242286367952048129

[Thread]

1241104227138777092

1242410270292692993

1242286367952048129

...thus, I'd fire his assPERIOD

[Thread]

This woman/no relation lost her father to Corona@EmeraldRobinson


· Mar 22

President Trump: "We must try hydroxychloroquine & azithromycin." The Media: "That's false hope! It's not approved for use yet!"
New York Gov. Cuomo: "We must try hydroxychloroquine & azithromycin." The Media: "This is real leadership! What a fantastic idea!"

tee, hee.

[Blake]

This woman/no relation lost her father to Corona@EmeraldRobinson


· Mar 22

President Trump: "We must try hydroxychloroquine & azithromycin." The Media: "That's false hope! It's not approved for use yet!"
New York Gov. Cuomo: "We must try hydroxychloroquine & azithromycin." The Media: "This is real leadership! What a fantastic idea!"

tee, hee.

Trump: WE NEED TO USE H&A IMMEDIATELY! MOVE FAST! PEOPLE ARE DYING!

Cuomo: We want to be first in line for the clinical trials.


Totally the same thing

[ducks]

https://scontent-lax3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/fr/cp0/e15/q65/90815447_10217380966695883_8123476713880420352_n.j pg?_nc_cat=107&_nc_sid=8024bb&efg=eyJpIjoidCJ9&_nc_oc=AQmXiLlc0RFHTM9hypKmEy8L-irFhxyHdWApIkluSEcO11smGUJ32AdF7fGotyoXYcup6LB3uMf-RmhB8dRKn_WJ&_nc_ht=scontent-lax3-2.xx&_nc_tp=14&oh=48da13b80223d225a32985d24139a74e&oe=5E9FD870

[ducks]

Gallup Poll: Handling of Virus Gives Trump Record Approval


President Donald Trump's job approval rating is up to 49%, according to the latest Gallup poll, a tie for his highest on record, likely due to a bump from his handing of the coronavirus pandemic.

[boutons_deux]

New Poll Shows Biden Trouncing Trump In 300 Swing Counties Across America


the overall national race between Biden and Trump is tight, with the former

VP leading Trump 48 percent to 45 percent.

But for the president, a more troubling piece of data from the survey is that

Biden leads by a whopping nine percentage points in 300 swing counties across America.
According to Monmouth,

“In approximately 300 ‘swing’ counties where the margin of victory was less than ten points for either candidate – accounting for about one-fifth of the total U.S. electorate –

50% back Biden compared with 41% who support Trump.”

https://www.politicususa.com/2020/03/24/new-poll-shows-biden-trouncing-trump-in-300-swing-counties-across-america.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+politicususa%2FfJAl+%28Politi cus+USA+%29

[Winehole23]

Coincidence I'm sure

1242229985139724290
Nobody bats an eye at obvious conflicts of interest.

The norm against corruption has been broken by Trump and a jaded, nihilistic electorate

[Blake]

Nobody bats an eye at obvious conflicts of interest.

The norm against corruption has been broken by Trump and a jaded, nihilistic electorate

I think you can go back further than Trump to see nobody batting an eye at obvious corruption

[Winehole23]

I think you can go back further than Trump to see nobody batting an eye at obvious corruption What/who broke it, in your opinion?

I can't think of a single example of a President before DJT whose direct financial interests conflicted with policy. Can you?

[Blake]

What/who broke it, in your opinion?

I can't think of a single example of a President before DJT whose direct financial interests conflicted with policy. Can you?

Cheney/halliburton immediately came to my mind

[boutons_deux]

I think you can go back further than Trump to see nobody batting an eye at obvious corruption

Of course, legal bribery of Congress goes by the euphemism of "lobbying", by the LIE of "social welfare" orgs that are totally political PACs, etc, etc.

the total corruption of the political class delivering the preferences of BigDonor, while ignoring voters?

could America be fucked and unfuckable?

say it ain't so

[boutons_deux]

“STATE WAS CAUGHT FLAT-FOOTED”: FOLLOWING TRUMP’S LINE, SOURCES SAY POMPEO LEFT STATE VULNERABLE DURING THE CRISIS
Former diplomats say that “no steps were taken to protect Americans overseas” and that Pompeo, seeing political danger, wants to stay as far from the crisis as possible.

With roughly 75,000 employees scattered around the world,

many in countries where the contagion took hold before the novel coronavirus hit American shores, the State Department isn’t a typical workplace.

Sources I spoke with have criticized Pompeo’s decision to follow

the Trumpian line—“totally under control”; it’s just like the flu—arguing that

it left diplomats and Americans overseas at risk.

“State was caught flat-footed just like everyone else because of the deliberate approach of the White House to downplay the problem….

How did State not stand up a task force?” a former ambassador told me.

“Under any other secretary, a task force would have been stood up months ago. To review conditions in every single country.”


https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/mike-pompeo-state-department-coronavirus?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=pol&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_mailing=thematic_ballot_03252020&utm_medium=email&bxid=5bd6795524c17c1048022fcc&cndid=43758549&utm_term=Thematic_Ballot_Subscribers (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/mike-pompeo-state-department-coronavirus?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=pol&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_mailing=thematic_ballot_03252020&utm_medium=email&bxid=5bd6795524c17c1048022fcc&cndid=43758549&utm_term=Thematic_Ballot_Subscribers)

[pgardn]

“STATE WAS CAUGHT FLAT-FOOTED”: FOLLOWING TRUMP’S LINE, SOURCES SAY POMPEO LEFT STATE VULNERABLE DURING THE CRISIS


Former diplomats say that “no steps were taken to protect Americans overseas” and that Pompeo, seeing political danger, wants to stay as far from the crisis as possible.

With roughly 75,000 employees scattered around the world,

many in countries where the contagion took hold before the novel coronavirus hit American shores, the State Department isn’t a typical workplace.

Sources I spoke with have criticized Pompeo’s decision to follow

the Trumpian line—“totally under control”; it’s just like the flu—arguing that

it left diplomats and Americans overseas at risk.

“State was caught flat-footed just like everyone else because of the deliberate approach of the White House to downplay the problem….

How did State not stand up a task force?” a former ambassador told me.

“Under any other secretary, a task force would have been stood up months ago. To review conditions in every single country.”


https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/mike-pompeo-state-department-coronavirus?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=pol&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_mailing=thematic_ballot_03252020&utm_medium=email&bxid=5bd6795524c17c1048022fcc&cndid=43758549&utm_term=Thematic_Ballot_Subscribers (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/mike-pompeo-state-department-coronavirus?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=pol&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_mailing=thematic_ballot_03252020&utm_medium=email&bxid=5bd6795524c17c1048022fcc&cndid=43758549&utm_term=Thematic_Ballot_Subscribers)


Inaction because they are afraid to do their job or just cant.
Sounds a whole lot like China. Find a friend, nestle in, and dont rock the boat.

The hypocrisy of "draining the swamp" is so face smacking obvious.

[SnakeBoy]

Vlad fearlessly visits Covid-19 patients in Russia


https://images.hamodia.com/hamod-uploads/2020/03/2020-03-24T140906Z_916849846_RC2DQF98CPME_RTRMADP_3_HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS-RUSSIA-PUTIN-1024x773.jpg

[weebo]

Vlad fearlessly visits Covid-19 patients in Russia


https://images.hamodia.com/hamod-uploads/2020/03/2020-03-24T140906Z_916849846_RC2DQF98CPME_RTRMADP_3_HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS-RUSSIA-PUTIN-1024x773.jpg

Sure he did. :lol

[boutons_deux]

Because so much they love America, love the Constitution, and love the 1st Amenmdent

Pro-Trump group demands TV stations stop airing liberal super PAC ad

demanding they stop running a new ad cut by a top Democratic super PAC.

sent a letter to station managers in Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania demanding a new ad cut by Priorities USA be taken off the air,

arguing that it falsely gives the impression that Trump called the coronavirus a “hoax.”

Priorities USA announced it would put $6 million behind a new ad accusing Trump of mismanaging the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkMwvmJLnc0), which is called “Exponential Threat,” splices together different audio clips of Trump downplaying the virus over a graphic showing the number of cases on the rise.
“The coronavirus, this is their new hoax,” Trump says in the spliced ad.

“We have it totally under control.

It's one person coming in from China.

One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear.

When you have 15 people and within a couple of days is gonna be down to close to zero.

We really think we've done a great job in keeping it down to a minimum.

I like this stuff.

I really get it.

People are surprised that I understand.

No, I don't take responsibility."


"We stand by the facts in the ad and

will continue to make sure that

Donald Trump is held accountable for his words and actions that are

making this crisis even worse,"

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/489476-pro-trump-group-demands-tv-stations-stop-airing-liberal-super-pac-ad (https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/489476-pro-trump-group-demands-tv-stations-stop-airing-liberal-super-pac-ad)

[boutons_deux]

Before Trump called for reevaluating lockdowns,

they shuttered six of his top-earning clubs and resorts

six of Trump’s top seven revenue-producing clubs and hotels, bringing in about $174 million total per year, according to Trump’s most recent financial disclosures. That works out to $478,000 per day —

revenue that is likely to be sharply reduced with the clubs shuttered. The disclosures provide self-reported revenue figures but not profits.

In Chicago, New York and Washington, the restaurants have closed, cutting off a key source of revenue.

Doral resort, :lol where restaurants closed last week to comply with lockdown orders.

The steakhouse told the state of Florida in a public filing that its entire 98-person workforce — six bartenders, 16 bussers, 24 captains, eight hosts, six managers, eight runners, four chefs, five dishwashers, 18 line cooks and three pastry chefs — had all been laid off.

160 people have been laid off at Trump’s D.C. hotel,

at least 51 laid off at Trump’s New York hotel and

an unknown number laid off at Trump’s Las Vegas hotel,

Three of Trump’s hotels — in Doral (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-prized-doral-resort-is-in-steep-decline-according-to-company-documents-showing-his-business-problems-are-mounting/2019/05/14/03cc701a-6b54-11e9-be3a-33217240a539_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_30&itid=lk_inline_manual_30), Chicago (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/who-built-this-beautiful-place-despite-trumps-visits-to-his-properties-some-of-his-businesses-show-new-signs-of-financial-decline/2019/11/05/819869cc-f691-11e9-8cf0-4cc99f74d127_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_30&itid=lk_inline_manual_30)and Washington (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trumps-washington-hotel-has-fallen-behind-competitors-with-rooms-running-nearly-half-empty-marketing-materials-show/2019/11/14/c1a9fc40-070f-11ea-b17d-8b867891d39d_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_30&itid=lk_inline_manual_30)— have outstanding loans from Deutsche Bank that originally totaled more than $300 million. Even before the coronavirus outbreak, all three reported lagging behind their peers in occupancy and revenue

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/before-trump-called-for-reevaluating-lockdowns-they-shuttered-six-of-his-top-earning-clubs-and-resorts/2020/03/23/88780374-6d38-11ea-aa80-c2470c6b2034_story.html

goddamn, schadenfreude is best served hot, cold, liquid, frozen, boiled, fried, BBQ

Vlad, your puppet needs some of your mafioso to launder MANY $100Ms through Trash's businesses.

[Blake]

1242777450662244352

All class

[Splits]

1242777450662244352

All class

Jesus. Dale is going to wish he still had a working prostate after reading this.

[boutons_deux]

editorial from January predicted Trump’s disastrous coronavirus response to a T

Klain singled out former national security adviser John Bolton’s decision to disband the National Security Council’s pandemic response unit as a worrisome sign of things to come, as it left the NSC rudderless

“With no one in charge at the White House,

there is no authority to resolve disputes between federal agencies;

no one to hold agencies accountable for the pace and intensity with which they implement the response;

no one to resolve competing requests for congressional funding; and

no one to draw on the resources of the security agencies of the government to help support the response,”

“[Trump] will have to govern, :lol :lol

as Democratic and Republican presidents have before him,

but unlike how he has conducted himself at any point in his presidency to date,” Klain concluded.

“Many lives — mostly abroad, but perhaps here as well — could depend on it.”

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/this-editorial-from-january-predicted-trumps-disastrous-coronavirus-response-to-a-t/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4117 (https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/this-editorial-from-january-predicted-trumps-disastrous-coronavirus-response-to-a-t/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4117)

==================

Coronavirus Is Coming—And Trump Isn’t Ready

JANUARY 30, 2020

In order to combat the disease, the president will have to trust the kind of government experts he has disdained and dismissed.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/now-trump-needs-deep-state-fight-coronavirus/605752/ (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/now-trump-needs-deep-state-fight-coronavirus/605752/)

[Chris]

Romney good now.

[Splits]

1243289216794021889

:lmao and then Trump goes after him in his "press" briefing.

[boutons_deux]

1243289216794021889

:lmao and then Trump goes after him in his "press" briefing.

isn't Inslee Trash's "snake"

[boutons_deux]

Trump calls Inslee a 'snake'

over criticism of coronavirus rhetoric

The president went off on Inslee for saying that

he wanted Trump to stick to the science when discussing the coronavirus outbreak.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/06/donald-trump-jay-inslee-coronavirus-123114 (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/06/donald-trump-jay-inslee-coronavirus-123114)

[Chris]

another Kyle Griffin repeater :lol

[ducks]

1243289216794021889

:lmao and then Trump goes after him in his "press" briefing.

Lol trump fights back and fights
Trump is no pussy

[Blake]

Lol trump fights back and fights
Trump is no pussy

Trump wants to fight instead of bring everyone together during a national crisis. That's your god.

[boutons_deux]

Trump’s coronavirus intel failure is worse than Pearl Harbor and 9/11 —

and he only has himself to blame

in light of what we know about President Trump’s response (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/23/apparently-trump-ignored-early-coronavirus-warnings-that-has-consequences/)to early warnings about the impending coronavirus pandemic,

his dismissals amount to the biggest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

the Trump administration forced a catastrophic strategic surprise onto the American people,” Zenko writes.

“But unlike past strategic surprises—

Pearl Harbor, the Iranian revolution of 1979, or especially 9/11—

the current one was brought about by unprecedented indifference, even willful negligence.”

the worst characteristics of Trump’s leadership ??? :lol is what allowed the intelligence failure to happen.

One example is Trump’s unwillingness to accept information that conflicts with his own worldview.

Another is the fact that Trump’s “judgments are highly transmissible, :lol Bandy X Lee wrote that Trash's illness is transmissible

infecting the thinking and behavior of nearly every official or advisor who comes in contact with the initial carrier” —

a problem that’s compounded by the fact that Trump surrounds himself with people who “look, think, and act like he does.”

there probably wasn’t much his top advisors could have done to convince him otherwise.

“The White House detachment and nonchalance during the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak will be

among the most costly decisions of any modern presidency,”

“These officials were presented with a clear progression of warnings and crucial decision points

far enough in advance that the country could have been far better prepared.”

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/trumps-coronavirus-intel-failure-is-worse-than-pearl-harbor-and-9-11-and-he-only-has-himself-to-blame-analysis/

[picnroll]

Lol trump fights back and fights
Trump is no pussy

Are you referring to private bone spurs? :lmao

[Spurminator]

1243351626209001472

[Spurminator]

1243330438942404616

[boutons_deux]

yep, $Ts for Trash's BigDonors, but dickering and dithering about $1B for sick Americans.

Fuck Trash and Repugs to hell

[baseline bum]

Wow $2.3 trillion cost for his tax cuts for the rich but he's worried about $1 billion to save lives now and maybe be a bit prepared next time we have to deal with this shit? As soon as this winter if Fauci is right about this possibly being seasonal? How the fuck can anyone defend Trump?

[ChumpDumper]

Wow $2.3 trillion cost for his tax cuts for the rich but he's worried about $1 billion to save lives now and maybe be a bit prepared next time we have to deal with this shit? As soon as this winter if Fauci is right about this possibly being seasonal? How the fuck can anyone defend Trump?HEY ASSHOLE HE STOPPED TRAVEL FROM CHINA THAT ONE TIME PRAISE HIM

[Spurs Homer]

Wow $2.3 trillion cost for his tax cuts for the rich but he's worried about $1 billion to save lives now and maybe be a bit prepared next time we have to deal with this shit? As soon as this winter if Fauci is right about this possibly being seasonal? How the fuck can anyone defend Trump?

im willing to bet that trump found a way to profit from theses private companies and how the states are “bidding against each other” for lifesaving supplies...

[DMX7]

1242777450662244352

All class

He has serious issues.

[Chris]

https://twitter.com/catturd2/status/1243324179639926786?s=19

[Blake]

K,
Lol gateway pundit
Lol catturd
Lol keeping up with Kathy Griffin

[picnroll]

Senate Republicans slipped a tax break for wealthy real estate investors into the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package

https://www.businessinsider.com/wealthy-real-estate-investors-get-tax-cut-in-coronavirus-stimulus-2020-3

[Spurs Homer]

HEY ASSHOLE HE STOPPED TRAVEL FROM CHINA THAT ONE TIME PRAISE HIM


:lmao:lmao

[Thread]

K,
Lol gateway pundit
Lol catturd
Lol keeping up with Kathy Griffin

Your side sacrificed her, by God. Left her out in the cold.

"I'm sorry, Mr. President."
"I'm not sorry, Mr. President. I hate you again."
"I"m sorry, Mr. President. I can't get a gig cept in Bumfuck Egypt."
"I hate you, Mr. President. And I always will."
"I'm sorry I carried around that bloody bust, sir."
"I'm glad I carried around that bloody bust, sir.
on & on...

[Thread]

:lmao:lmao

It counts, Homer. He cut China off. You can't wish it away like MSM is wishing away Louisiana running Mardi Gra & now needing "a good supply of body bags." - "Col Trautmann"

[Spurs Homer]

It counts, Homer. He cut China off. You can't wish it away like MSM is wishing away Louisiana running Mardi Gra & now needing "a good supply of body bags." - "Col Trautmann"

nope

obama had a us expert inside china to keep tabs and keep us informed in case of fuckery


trump got rid of him

and fucked the usa

[Thread]

nope

obama had a us expert inside china to keep tabs and keep us informed in case of fuckery


trump got rid of him

and fucked the usa

Please, Obama lost 12.5k American lives during his Presidency.

[Chris]

Your side sacrificed her, by God. Left her out in the cold.

"I'm sorry, Mr. President."
"I'm not sorry, Mr. President. I hate you again."
"I"m sorry, Mr. President. I can't get a gig cept in Bumfuck Egypt."
"I hate you, Mr. President. And I always will."
"I'm sorry I carried around that bloody bust, sir."
"I'm glad I carried around that bloody bust, sir.
on & on...

Blake doesn't watch Hollywood stuff, just cartoons on Disney + and superhero/Star Wars movies. He washed his hands when Madonna was publically talking about blowing up the White House. The lol thingy works like a safe space where he can still be cynical and separate himself. He doesn't understand how raw feeds work, and he thinks I'm actively searching for updates on Kathy Griffin.

[Chris]

https://twitter.com/senatemajldr/status/1243637711703019527?s=19

[spurraider21]

https://twitter.com/senatemajldr/status/1243637711703019527?s=19
Chuck and Nancy

[Blake]

Blake doesn't watch Hollywood stuff, just cartoons on Disney + and superhero/Star Wars movies. He washed his hands when Madonna was publically talking about blowing up the White House. The lol thingy works like a safe space where he can still be cynical and separate himself. He doesn't understand how raw feeds work, and he thinks I'm actively searching for updates on Kathy Griffin.

You're actively retweeting updates on Kathy Griffin. In a Donald Trump thread. On a political message board.

Lol seriously, who does that?

[Blake]

Your side sacrificed her, by God. Left her out in the cold.

"I'm sorry, Mr. President."
"I'm not sorry, Mr. President. I hate you again."
"I"m sorry, Mr. President. I can't get a gig cept in Bumfuck Egypt."
"I hate you, Mr. President. And I always will."
"I'm sorry I carried around that bloody bust, sir."
"I'm glad I carried around that bloody bust, sir.
on & on...

Huh

[ElNono]

Chuck and Nancy

[picnroll]

Repugs snuck in the pork for Trump family provision so he good.

[Winehole23]

You're actively retweeting updates on Kathy Griffin. In a Donald Trump thread. On a political message board.

Lol seriously, who does that? Chris

[Winehole23]

Repugs snuck in the pork for Trump family provision so he good.And Trump essentially line item vetoes the IG provision via signing statement, like we do now. Trump is announcing his intention to gag the IG.


“I do not understand, and my administration will not treat, this provision as permitting the S.I.G.P.R. to issue reports to the Congress without the presidential supervision required”

[ChumpDumper]

And Trump essentially line item vetoes the IG provision via signing statement, like we do now. Trump is announcing his intention to gag the IG.:lmao Dennison: "I do not understand"

[boutons_deux]

Biden Leads By 9 As Trump’s Coronavirus Bump Vanishes

Joe Biden leads Donald Trump 49%-40% as Trump’s

coronavirus approval bump looks to be a polling mirage that wasn’t driven by Trump’s approval.

Biden’s advantage grows to

25 points, 57-32 percent,

in close counties (where Hillary Clinton and Trump were within 10 points in 2016).

https://www.politicususa.com/2020/03/27/biden-leads-by-9-as-trumps-coronavirus-bump-vanishes.html (https://www.politicususa.com/2020/03/27/biden-leads-by-9-as-trumps-coronavirus-bump-vanishes.html)

eat shit, Trash fellators. Trash is one-and-done. HCQ ain't gonna save his hated ass

[Spurs Homer]

If you are seeing this shell of a once-great country...
people dying...
economy gone to shit...

and you see the USA getting “puerto ricoed” by the bungling of this current crises


and you DONT hate *trump

then there is something seriously wrong with you.




(*impeached criminal)

[boutons_deux]

Donald Trump demands his own signature be on coronavirus stimulus checks to every American

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/donald-trump-demands-his-own-signature-be-on-coronavirus-stimulus-checks-to-every-american-report/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4135

[Winehole23]

Donald Trump demands his own signature be on coronavirus stimulus checks to every American

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/donald-trump-demands-his-own-signature-be-on-coronavirus-stimulus-checks-to-every-american-report/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4135Free campaign ads, tbh

[Thread]

If you are seeing this shell of a once-great country...
people dying...
economy gone to shit...

and you see the USA getting “puerto ricoed” by the bungling of this current crises


and you DONT hate *trump

then there is something seriously wrong with you.




(*impeached criminal)

& yet if Biden wins come the 1st Tuesday in November we'll be right as the post the following 20 January.

Funny how that works.

[boutons_deux]

Free campaign ads, tbh

Of course, a cheap campaign scam "Americans, I, Don The Con Trash, personally sent you those checks"

[Thread]

Of course, a cheap campaign scam "Americans, I, Don The Con Trash, personally sent you those checks"

Fine, send me your 1200 smackers...to...

Stinkpot Castleberry
1200 Bonny Meadow Road
New Rochelle, NY., 10801

[DMC]

Fine, send me your 1200 smackers...to...

Stinkpot Castleberry
1200 Bonny Meadow Road
New Rochelle, NY., 10801

You want it hand delivered. Nothing like a leisurely stroll through the new New Rochelle.

[monosylab1k]

Jeanine Pirro goes on air smashed :lol

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/was-foxs-jeanine-pirro-drunk-on-saturday-night-twitter-seems-to-think-so-boxed-wine-is-a-hell-of-a-drug/

https://mobile.twitter.com/atrupar/status/1244085811466899459

[boutons_deux]

This Fox News poll makes Donald Trump so sad,

particularly the Elizabeth Warren part




JOE BIDEN
DONALD TRUMP


MARCH 21-24
49
40


FEBRUARY 2020
49
41


JANUARY 2020
50
41


OCTOBER 2019
51
39




https://images.dailykos.com/images/784230/large/ae97d125-5.png?1585412393

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/28/1932096/-This-Fox-News-poll-makes-Donald-Trump-so-sad-particularly-the-Elizabeth-Warren-part

[Thread]

This Fox News poll makes Donald Trump so sad,

particularly the Elizabeth Warren part



https://images.dailykos.com/images/784230/large/ae97d125-5.png?1585412393

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/28/1932096/-This-Fox-News-poll-makes-Donald-Trump-so-sad-particularly-the-Elizabeth-Warren-part

The night before Election Day/'16, we were assured by MSM that there was a 98+% rate that Hillary would be -45-.

Uh, uh.

[boutons_deux]

The night before Election Day/'16, we were assured by MSM that there was a 98+% rate that Hillary would be -45-.

Uh, uh.

Silver saw Comey/Nunes throw the EC to Trash. Trash owes his Reign of Bullshit and Error to Comey, but he attacks Comey

[Thread]

Silver saw Comey/Nunes throw the EC to Trash. Trash owes his Reign of Bullshit and Error to Comey, but he attacks Comey

& your side was supposed to get on that EC thing in time for the '20 Election, like you were supposed to get on it after the '00 Election for the '04 Election.

You snooze you lose.

[Splits]

1244320570315018240

[ElNono]

1244320570315018240

wtf

[Blake]

1244320570315018240

Goddam

[Blake]

1244351719229833216

And yet the Chris's, ducks and cubbies of the world will run off the edge of a cliff for this guy

[ChumpDumper]

1244351719229833216

And yet the Chris's, ducks and cubbies of the world will run off the edge of a cliff for this guy:lol that's a TSA level edit.

[Thread]

1244320570315018240

I don't miss a one.

He won & they can't take that back. & that's what drives 'em to distraction. They can't get it back. He's -45- forever & he's fully cognizant of that fact.

[ChumpDumper]

I don't miss a one.

He won & they can't take that back. & that's what drives 'em to distraction. They can't get it back. He's -45*- forever & he's fully cognizant of that fact.























*impeached

[Chris]

another day, another TDS outrage from NPC

[Spurtacular]

*impeached

*unsuccessfully.

[monosylab1k]

*unsuccessfully.

Do you not understand what being impeached means? lol derp

[Spurtacular]

Do you not understand what being impeached means? lol derp

I understand that the Dems effectively impeached themselves.

:lmao #FailedShitShow

[Thread]

*impeached

Still President forever...like the 44 before him.

[monosylab1k]

I understand that the Dems effectively impeached themselves.

:lmao #FailedShitShow

Trump was successfully impeachedPERIOD

[monosylab1k]

Still President forever...like the 44 before him.

Trump Impeached. Not Obama.

[ChumpDumper]

*unsuccessfully.
*successfully impeached

[Spurtacular]

*successfully impeached

:cry Gonna come out of muh safe space for this slam dunk :cry

:lol

[Spurtacular]

Trump Impeached. Not Obama.

There's a feather in your cap.

[monosylab1k]

There's a feather in your cap.

And a shit sandwich in your piehole.

[Spurtacular]

And a shit sandwich in your piehole.

I bet that almost sounded good in your head.

[monosylab1k]

I bet that almost sounded good in your head.
https://i.imgur.com/dTcAHZcg.jpg

[Blake]

:cry Gonna come out of muh safe space for this slam dunk :cry

:lol

So derp recognizes he got dunked on.

I think.

[Spurtacular]

So derp recognizes he got dunked on.

I think.

I through an alley-oop to Chump on a mini court is all.

[Blake]

I through an alley-oop to Chump on a mini court is all.

Yeah we all know how much you struggle on the mini courts here. It's why you retreat to your hur dur comfort posts.

[Spurtacular]

Yeah we all know how much you struggle on the mini courts here. It's why you retreat to your hur dur comfort posts.

:lol You're the one who does that all the time.

I would say I've never uttered those words on here even, but am not a hundred percent sure. I may have mocked you once or twice for it.

[boutons_deux]

Trump to Governors:

I’d Like You to Do Us a Favor, Though

Once again, the president is using aid to extort re-election help.

he’s strongly suggested that

if governors speak candidly about his monumental incompetence,

he’ll penalize them and their states as they struggle to contain the coronavirus.

Once again, he’s using his control of vital aid to extort assistance with his re-election.

“There are a lot of parallels between the president’s behavior now and during the whole Ukraine scandal,”

“Certainly the most apparent is

his demand that the governors basically pay fealty to him, praise him, or they’ll suffer consequences.”

he had instructed Vice President Mike Pence, whom he has placed in charge of the coronavirus response,

not to call the governors of some blue states (https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-members-coronavirus-task-force-press-briefing-13/) where the pandemic is raging.

Florida, governed by the Republican Trump sycophant Ron DeSantis, has had

its requests for equipment from America’s emergency stockpile entirely fulfilled,

while other states are receiving only a fraction of what they ask for.

governors feel life-or-death pressure to flatter the president.

“Several governors made clear

they fear inadvertently harming their own citizens

if they are too strident in demands for desperately needed medical supplies, or

if they clash too publicly with Trump over pandemic policy as the contagion spreads,”

“working under the assumption they will not get much help from the federal government,

but that criticizing Trump could jeopardize any help they could receive.”

Besides Ukraine, there is another precedent for Trump’s behavior: Puerto Rico.

After Hurricane Maria, Trump grew incensed when the female mayor of San Juan called out the administration’s inadequate response, and

he’s been punishing the island ever since,

slowing the release of aid (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/puerto-rico-was-invisible-trump-made-things-worse/604984/) and

slashing its Medicaid funding (https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/17/trump-puerto-rico-medicaid-budget-086674).

Now we’re all, as the president said (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/us/politics/yovanovitch-trump-ukraine-ambassador.html) of the former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch,

going to go through some things.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/opinion/trump-federal-aid-coronavirus.html

Trash is the American Achmed: Suck my dick, kiss my ass, or I will KEEL YOU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBvfiCdk-jc

[boutons_deux]

Trump’s Breakdown

Old traits — bluster, defiance, implacable self-promotion — that once worked well

now threaten to sink a presidency.
Donald Trump during the pandemic is giving a new generation reason to wonder whether he—like other presidents who suddenly find currents of history shifting violently before them—is on the verge of breakdown.

Trump emphatically has faced real opposition, and reveled in it, on his path to power.

But he has met earlier chapters of adversity, in politics and business, with reliance on traits—bluster, defiance, implacable self-promotion—that, however unorthodox, served him quite well in the old context.

people easily miss how bizarre these circumstances are in historical terms.

Is there any equivalent example in American history of a president

confronting a grave domestic or international crisis with a similar combination of impetuosity and self-reference?




of the previous century’s greatest president.

“I claim not to have controlled events but

confess plainly that events have controlled me,”

Abraham Lincoln said, describing his evolution during the Civil War on the abolition of slavery.

Trump, by contrast, asked recently by a reporter to grade himself, said,

“I’d rate it a 10, I think we’ve done a great job.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/01/trump-breakdown-threaten-sink-presidency-158321

[monosylab1k]

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/187599309078921216?s=20
Warns that Obama might start a war with Iran before the election.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1245396884040097792?s=20
Proceeds to threaten Iran before an election.

[boutons_deux]

Trump boasted of getting Putin to stabilize oil prices —

but the Kremlin says it never happened

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/trump-boasted-of-getting-putin-to-stabilize-oil-prices-but-the-kremlin-says-it-never-happened/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4193

[Spurs Homer]

Trump boasted of getting Putin to stabilize oil prices —

but the Kremlin says it never happened

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/trump-boasted-of-getting-putin-to-stabilize-oil-prices-but-the-kremlin-says-it-never-happened/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4193


who you gonna believe-

the fucking liars in the kremlin?

or

the fucking liars in the white house?

[ElNono]

In a development that should surprise nobody, especially at this particular time:

Trump fires intelligence community watchdog who defied him on whistleblower complaint
The president informed Congress of the move in a Friday-evening letter to the House and Senate intelligence committees.

President Donald Trump has fired the intelligence community’s chief watchdog, Michael Atkinson, who was the first to sound the alarm to Congress last September about an “urgent” complaint he received from an intelligence official involving Trump’s communications with Ukraine’s president.

Atkinson's decision set in motion the congressional probe that culminated in Trump's impeachment and ultimate acquittal in a bruising political and legal drama that consumed Washington for months.

Trump formally notified the Senate and House Intelligence Committees of his intention to fire Atkinson, to take effect 30 days from Friday, according to two congressional officials and a copy of the letter obtained by POLITICO dated April 3.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/trump-fires-intelligence-community-inspector-general-164287

[Blake]

You have to have serious stones to be a whistle blower in this modern day and age

[velik_m]

https://twitter.com/lenkiefer/status/1245702858449784832

[Thread]

In a development that should surprise nobody, especially at this particular time:

Trump fires intelligence community watchdog who defied him on whistleblower complaint
The president informed Congress of the move in a Friday-evening letter to the House and Senate intelligence committees.

President Donald Trump has fired the intelligence community’s chief watchdog, Michael Atkinson, who was the first to sound the alarm to Congress last September about an “urgent” complaint he received from an intelligence official involving Trump’s communications with Ukraine’s president.

Atkinson's decision set in motion the congressional probe that culminated in Trump's impeachment and ultimate acquittal in a bruising political and legal drama that consumed Washington for months.

Trump formally notified the Senate and House Intelligence Committees of his intention to fire Atkinson, to take effect 30 days from Friday, according to two congressional officials and a copy of the letter obtained by POLITICO dated April 3.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/trump-fires-intelligence-community-inspector-general-164287

He'll get that $600 smackers a week + unemployment.

[Th'Pusher]

https://twitter.com/lenkiefer/status/1245702858449784832

The hockey stick

[boutons_deux]

In a development that should surprise nobody, especially at this particular time:

Trump fires intelligence community watchdog who defied him on whistleblower complaint
The president informed Congress of the move in a Friday-evening letter to the House and Senate intelligence committees.

President Donald Trump has fired the intelligence community’s chief watchdog, Michael Atkinson, who was the first to sound the alarm to Congress last September about an “urgent” complaint he received from an intelligence official involving Trump’s communications with Ukraine’s president.

Atkinson's decision set in motion the congressional probe that culminated in Trump's impeachment and ultimate acquittal in a bruising political and legal drama that consumed Washington for months.

Trump formally notified the Senate and House Intelligence Committees of his intention to fire Atkinson, to take effect 30 days from Friday, according to two congressional officials and a copy of the letter obtained by POLITICO dated April 3.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/trump-fires-intelligence-community-inspector-general-164287

dickless wannabe Macho man Trash "punches back" when there no risk of a counter punch, when power equation is heavily on his side.

sends a signal to the entire govt, "don't fuck with me, my crimes, my corruption"

[picnroll]

The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged
From the Oval Office to the CDC, political and institutional failures cascaded through the system and opportunities to mitigate the pandemic were lost.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/04/04/coronavirus-government-dysfunction/?p9w22b2p=b2p22p9w00098&tid=a_classic-iphone&no_nav=true

By the time Donald Trump proclaimed himself a wartime president — and the coronavirus the enemy — the United States was already on course to see more of its people die than in the wars of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
The country has adopted an array of wartime measures never employed collectively in U.S. history — banning incoming travelers from two continents, bringing commerce to a near-halt, enlisting industry to make emergency medical gear, and confining 230 million Americans to their homes in a desperate bid to survive an attack by an unseen adversary.

Despite these and other extreme steps, the United States will likely go down as the country that was supposedly best prepared to fight a pandemic but ended up catastrophically overmatched by the novel coronavirus, sustaining heavier casualties than any other nation.

It did not have to happen this way. Though not perfectly prepared, the United States had more expertise, resources, plans and epidemiological experience than dozens of countries that ultimately fared far better in fending off the virus.

The failure has echoes of the period leading up to 9/11: Warnings were sounded, including at the highest levels of government, but the president was deaf to them until the enemy had already struck.

The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3. Within days, U.S. spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by including a warning about the coronavirus — the first of many — in the President’s Daily Brief.

And yet, it took 70 days from that initial notification for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered.

Trump’s baseless assertions in those weeks, including his claim that it would all just “miraculously” go away, sowed significant public confusion and contradicted the urgent messages of public health experts.

“While the media would rather speculate about outrageous claims of palace intrigue, President Trump and this Administration remain completely focused on the health and safety of the American people with around the clock work to slow the spread of the virus, expand testing, and expedite vaccine development," said Judd Deere, a spokesman for the president. "Because of the President’s leadership we will emerge from this challenge healthy, stronger, and with a prosperous and growing economy.”
But the president’s behavior and combative statements were merely a visible layer on top of deeper levels of dysfunction.

The most consequential failure involved a breakdown in efforts to develop a diagnostic test that could be mass produced and distributed across the United States, enabling agencies to map early outbreaks of the disease, and impose quarantine measure to contain them. At one point, a Food and Drug Administration official tore into lab officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, telling them their lapses in protocol, including concerns that the lab did not meet the criteria for sterile conditions, were so serious that the FDA would “shut you down” if the CDC were a commercial, rather than government, entity.

Other failures cascaded through the system. The administration often seemed weeks behind the curve in reacting to the viral spread, closing doors that were already contaminated. Protracted arguments between the White House and public health agencies over funding, combined with a meager existing stockpile of emergency supplies, left vast stretches of the country’s health-care system without protective gear until the outbreak had become a pandemic. Infighting, turf wars and abrupt leadership changes hobbled the work of the coronavirus task force.

It may never be known how many thousands of deaths, or millions of infections, might have been prevented with a response that was more coherent, urgent and effective. But even now, there are many indications that the administration’s handling of the crisis had potentially devastating consequences.

Even the president’s base has begun to confront this reality. In mid-March, as Trump was rebranding himself a wartime president, and belatedly urging the public to help slow the spread of the virus, Republican leaders were poring over grim polling data that suggested Trump was lulling his followers into a false sense of security in the face of a lethal threat.

The poll showed that far more Republicans than Democrats were being influenced by Trump’s dismissive depictions of the virus and the comparably scornful coverage on Fox News and other conservative networks. As a result, Republicans were in distressingly large numbers refusing to change travel plans, follow “social distancing” guidelines, stock up on supplies or otherwise take the coronavirus threat seriously.

“Denial is not likely to be a successful strategy for survival,” GOP pollster Neil Newhouse concluded in a document that was shared with GOP leaders on Capitol Hill and discussed widely at the White House. Trump’s most ardent supporters, it said, were “putting themselves and their loved ones in danger.”

Trump’s message was changing as the report swept through the GOP’s senior ranks. In recent days, Trump has bristled at reminders that he had once claimed the caseload would soon be “down to zero.”

More than 7,000 people have died of the coronavirus in the United States so far, with about 240,000 cases reported. But Trump has acknowledged that new models suggest that the eventual national death toll could be between 100,000 and 240,000.

Beyond the suffering in store for thousands of victims and their families, the outcome has altered the international standing of the United States, damaging and diminishing its reputation as a global leader in times of extraordinary adversity.
“This has been a real blow to the sense that America was competent,” said Gregory F. Treverton, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the government’s senior-most provider of intelligence analysis. He stepped down from the NIC in January 2017 and now teaches at the University of Southern California. “That was part of our global role. Traditional friends and allies looked to us because they thought we could be competently called upon to work with them in a crisis. This has been the opposite of that.”

This article, which retraces the failures over the first 70 days of the coronavirus crisis, is based on 47 interviews with administration officials, public health experts, intelligence officers and others involved in fighting the pandemic. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and decisions.

Scanning the horizon
Public health authorities are part of a special breed of public servant — along with counterterrorism officials, military planners, aviation authorities and others — whose careers are consumed with contemplating worst-case scenarios.

The arsenal that they wield against viral invaders is powerful, capable of smothering a new pathogen while scrambling for a cure, but easily overwhelmed if not mobilized in time. As a result, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC and other agencies spend their days scanning the horizon for emerging dangers.

The CDC learned of a cluster of cases in China on Dec. 31 and began developing reports for HHS on Jan. 1. But the most unambiguous warning that U.S. officials received about the coronavirus came Jan. 3, when Robert Redfield, the CDC director, received a call from a counterpart in China. The official told Redfield that a mysterious respiratory illness was spreading in Wuhan, a congested commercial city of 11 million people in the communist country’s interior.

Redfield quickly relayed the disturbing news to Alex Azar, the secretary of HHS, the agency that oversees the CDC and other public health entities. Azar, in turn, ensured that the White House was notified, instructing his chief of staff to share the Chinese report with the National Security Council.

From that moment, the administration and the virus were locked in a race against a ticking clock, a competition for the upper hand between pathogen and prevention that would dictate the scale of the outbreak when it reached American shores, and determine how many would get sick or die.

The initial response was promising, but officials also immediately encountered obstacles.

On Jan. 6, Redfield sent a letter to the Chinese offering to send help, including a team of CDC scientists. China rebuffed the offer for weeks, turning away assistance and depriving U.S. authorities of an early chance to get a sample of the virus, critical for developing diagnostic tests and any potential vaccine.

China impeded the U.S. response in other ways, including by withholding accurate information about the outbreak. Beijing had a long track record of downplaying illnesses that emerged within its borders, an impulse that U.S. officials attribute to a desire by the country’s leaders to avoid embarrassment and accountability with China’s 1.3 billion people and other countries that find themselves in the pathogen’s path.

China stuck to this costly script in the case of the coronavirus, reporting Jan. 14 that it had seen “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” U.S. officials treated the claim with skepticism that intensified when the first case surfaced outside China with a reported infection in Thailand.

A week earlier, senior officials at HHS had begun convening an intra-agency task force including Redfield, Azar and Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The following week, there were also scattered meetings at the White House with officials from the National Security Council and State Department, focused mainly on when and whether to bring back government employees in China.

U.S. officials began taking preliminary steps to counter a potential outbreak. By mid-January, Robert Kadlec, an Air Force officer and physician who serves as assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, had instructed subordinates to draw up contingency plans for enforcing the Defense Production Act, a measure that enables the government to compel private companies to produce equipment or devices critical to the country’s security. Aides were bitterly divided over whether to implement the act, and nothing happened for many weeks.

On Jan. 14, Kadlec scribbled a single word in a notebook he carries: “Coronavirus!!!”
Despite the flurry of activity at lower levels of his administration, Trump was not substantially briefed by health officials about the coronavirus until Jan.18, when, while spending the weekend at Mar-a-Lago, he took a call from Azar.
Even before the heath secretary could get a word in about the virus, Trump cut him off and began criticizing Azar for his handling of an aborted federal ban on vaping products, a matter that vexed the president.

At the time, Trump was in the throes of an impeachment battle over his alleged attempt to coerce political favors from the leader of Ukraine. Acquittal seemed certain by the GOP-controlled Senate, but Trump was preoccupied with the trial, calling lawmakers late at night to rant, and making lists of perceived enemies he would seek to punish when the case against him concluded.

In hindsight, officials said, Azar could have been more forceful in urging Trump to turn at least some of his attention to a threat that would soon pose an even graver test to his presidency, a crisis that would cost American lives and consume the final year of Trump’s first term.

[picnroll]

But the secretary, who had a strained relationship with Trump and many others in the administration, assured the president that those responsible were working on and monitoring the issue. Azar told several associates that the president believed he was “alarmist” and Azar struggled to get Trump’s attention to focus on the issue, even asking one confidant for advice.
Within days, there were new causes for alarm.

On Jan. 21, a Seattle man who had recently traveled to Wuhan tested positive for the coronavirus, becoming the first known infection on U.S. soil. Then, two days later, Chinese authorities took the drastic step of shutting down Wuhan, turning the teeming metropolis into a ghost city of empty highways and shuttered skyscrapers, with millions of people marooned in their homes.

“That was like, whoa!,” said a senior U.S. official involved in White House meetings on the crisis. “That was when the Richter scale hit 8.”
It was also when U.S. officials began to confront the failings of their own efforts to respond.

Azar, who had served in senior positions at HHS through crises including the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the outbreak of Bird Flu in 2005, was intimately familiar with the playbook for crisis management.

He instructed subordinates to move rapidly to establish a nationwide surveillance system to track the spread of the coronavirus — a stepped-up version of what the CDC does every year to monitor new strains of the ordinary flu.

But doing so would require assets that would elude U.S. officials for months — a diagnostic test that could accurately identify those infected with the new virus and be produced on a mass scale for rapid deployment across the United States, and money to implement the system.

Azar’s team also hit another obstacle. The Chinese were still refusing to share the viral samples they had collected and were using to develop their own tests. In frustration, U.S. officials looked for other possible routes.
A biocontainment lab at the University of Texas medical branch in Galveston had a research partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Kadlec, who knew the Galveston lab director, hoped scientists could arrange a transaction on their own without government interference. At first, the lab in Wuhan agreed, but officials in Beijing intervened Jan. 24 and blocked any lab-to-lab transfer.

There is no indication that officials sought to escalate the matter or enlist Trump to intervene. In fact, Trump has consistently praised Chinese President Xi Jinping despite warnings from U.S. intelligence and health officials that Beijing was concealing the true scale of the outbreak and impeding cooperation on key fronts.
The CDC had issued its first public alert about the coronavirus Jan. 8, and by the 17th was monitoring major airports in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, where large numbers of passengers arrived each day from China.

But in other ways, the situation was already spinning out of control, with multiplying cases in Seattle, intransigence by the Chinese, mounting questions from the public, and nothing in place to stop infected travelers from arriving from abroad.
Trump was out of the country for this critical stretch, taking part in the annual global economic forum in Davos, Switzerland. He was accompanied by a contingent of top officials including national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who took an anxious trans-Atlantic call from Azar.

Azar told O’Brien that it was “mayhem” at the White House, with HHS officials being pressed to provide nearly identical briefings to three audiences on the same day.
Azar urged O’Brien to have the NSC assert control over a matter with potential implications for air travel, immigration authorities, the State Department and the Pentagon. O’Brien seemed to grasp the urgency, and put his deputy, Matthew Pottinger, who had worked in China as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, in charge of coordinating the still-nascent U.S. response.

But the rising anxiety within the administration appeared not to register with the president. On Jan. 22, Trump received his first question about the coronavirus in an interview on CNBC while in Davos. Asked whether he was worried about a potential pandemic, Trump said, “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. . . . It’s going to be just fine.”

Spreading uncontrollably
The move by the NSC to seize control of the response marked an opportunity to reorient U.S. strategy around containing the virus where possible and procuring resources that hospitals would need in any U.S. outbreak, including such basic equipment as protective masks and ventilators.

But instead of mobilizing for what was coming, U.S. officials seemed more preoccupied with logistical problems, including how to evacuate Americans from China.

In Washington, then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Pottinger began convening meetings at the White House with senior officials from HHS, the CDC and the State Department.

The group, which included Azar, Pottinger and Fauci, as well as nine others across the administration, formed the core of what would become the administration’s coronavirus task force. But it primarily focused on efforts to keep infected people in China from traveling to the United States even while evacuating thousands of U.S. citizens. The meetings did not seriously focus on testing or supplies, which have since become the administration’s most challenging problems.
The task force was formally announced on Jan. 29.

“The genesis of this group was around border control and repatriation,” said a senior official involved in the meetings. “It wasn’t a comprehensive, whole-of-government group to run everything.”

The State Department agenda dominated those early discussions, according to participants. Officials began making plans to charter aircraft to evacuate 6,000 Americans stranded in Wuhan. They also debated language for travel advisories that State could issue to discourage other travel in and out of China.

On Jan. 29, Mulvaney chaired a meeting in the White House Situation Room in which officials debated moving travel restrictions to “Level 4,” meaning a “do not travel” advisory from the State Department. Then, the next day, China took the draconian step of locking down the entire Hubei province, which encompasses Wuhan.

That move by Beijing finally prompted a commensurate action by the Trump administration. On Jan. 31, Azar announced restrictions barring any non-U.S. citizen who had been in China during the preceding two weeks from entering the United States.

Trump has, with some justification, pointed to the China-related restriction as evidence that he had responded aggressively and early to the outbreak. It was among the few intervention options throughout the crisis that played to the instincts of the president, who often seems fixated on erecting borders and keeping foreigners out of the country.

But by that point, 300,000 people had come into the United States from China over the previous month. There were only 7,818 confirmed cases around the world at the end of January, according to figures released by the World Health Organization — but it is now clear that the virus was spreading uncontrollably.

Pottinger was by then pushing for another travel ban, this time restricting the flow of travelers from Italy and other nations in the European Union that were rapidly emerging as major new nodes of the outbreak. Pottinger’s proposal was endorsed by key health-care officials, including Fauci, who argued that it was critical to close off any path the virus might take into the country.

This time, the plan met with resistance from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and others who worried about the impact on the U.S. economy. It was an early sign of tension in an area that would split the administration, pitting those who prioritized public health against those determined to avoid any disruption in an election year to the run of expansion and employment growth.

Those backing the economy prevailed with the president. And it was more than a month before the administration issued a belated and confusing ban on flights into the United States from Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people crossed the Atlantic during that interval.

A wall of resistance
While fights over air travel played out in the White House, public health officials began to panic over a startling shortage of critical medical equipment including protective masks for doctors and nurses, as well as a rapidly shrinking pool of money needed to pay for such things.

By early February, the administration was quickly draining a $105 million congressional fund to respond to infectious disease outbreaks. The coronavirus threat to the United States still seemed distant if not entirely hypothetical to much of the public. But to health officials charged with stockpiling supplies for worst-case-scenarios, disaster appeared increasingly inevitable.

A national stockpile of N95 protective masks, gowns, gloves and other supplies was already woefully inadequate after years of underfunding. The prospects for replenishing that store were suddenly threatened by the unfolding crisis in China, which disrupted offshore supply chains.

Much of the manufacturing of such equipment had long since migrated to China, where factories were now shuttered because workers were on order to stay in their households. At the same time, China was buying up masks and other gear to gird for its own coronavirus outbreak, driving up costs and monopolizing supplies.

In late January and early February, leaders at HHS sent two letters to the White House Office of Management and Budget asking to use its transfer authority to shift $136 million of department funds into pools that could be tapped for combating the coronavirus. Azar and his aides also began raising the need for a multibillion-dollar supplemental budget request to send to Congress.

Yet White House budget hawks argued that appropriating too much money at once when there were only a few U.S. cases would be viewed as alarmist.
Joe Grogan, head of the Domestic Policy Council, clashed with health officials over preparedness. He mistrusted how the money would be used and questioned how health officials had used previous preparedness funds.

Azar then spoke to Russell Vought, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, during Trump’s State of the Union speech on Feb. 4. Vought seemed amenable, and told Azar to submit a proposal.

Azar did so the next day, drafting a supplemental request for more than $4 billion, a sum that OMB officials and others at the White House greeted as an outrage. Azar arrived at the White House that day for a tense meeting in the Situation Room that erupted in a shouting match, according to three people familiar with the incident.
A deputy in the budget office accused Azar of preemptively lobbying Congress for a gigantic sum that White House officials had no interest in granting. Azar bristled at the criticism and defended the need for an emergency infusion. But his standing with White House officials, already shaky before the coronavirus crisis began, was damaged further.

White House officials relented to a degree weeks later as the feared coronavirus surge in the United States began to materialize. The OMB team whittled Azar’s demands down to $2.5 billion, money that would be available only in the current fiscal year. Congress ignored that figure, approving an $8 billion supplemental bill that Trump signed into law March 7.

But again, delays proved costly. The disputes meant that the United States missed a narrow window to stockpile ventilators, masks and other protective gear before the administration was bidding against many other desperate nations, and state officials fed up with federal failures began scouring for supplies themselves.

In late March, the administration ordered 10,000 ventilators — far short of what public health officials and governors said was needed. And many will not arrive until the summer or fall, when models expect the pandemic to be receding.
“It’s actually kind of a joke,” said one administration official involved in deliberations about the belated purchase.

Inconclusive tests
Although viruses travel unseen, public health officials have developed elaborate ways of mapping and tracking their movements. Stemming an outbreak or slowing a pandemic in many ways comes down to the ability to quickly divide the population into those who are infected and those who are not.

Doing so, however, hinges on having an accurate test to diagnose patients and deploy it rapidly to labs across the country. The time it took to accomplish that in the United States may have been more costly to American efforts than any other failing.

“If you had the testing, you could say, ‘Oh my god, there’s circulating virus in Seattle, let’s jump on it. There’s circulating virus in Chicago, let’s jump on it,’ ” said a senior administration official involved in battling the outbreak. “We didn’t have that visibility.”

The first setback came when China refused to share samples of the virus, depriving U.S. researchers of supplies to bombard with drugs and therapies in a search for ways to defeat it. But even when samples had been procured, the U.S. effort was hampered by systemic problems and institutional hubris.

Among the costliest errors was a misplaced assessment by top health officials that the outbreak would probably be limited in scale inside the United States — as had been the case with every other infection for decades — and that the CDC could be trusted on its own to develop a coronavirus diagnostic test.

The CDC, launched in the 1940s to contain an outbreak of malaria in the southern United States, had taken the lead on the development of diagnostic tests in major outbreaks including Ebola, Zika and H1N1. But the CDC was not built to mass-produce tests.

The CDC’s success had fostered an institutional arrogance, a sense that even in the face of a potential crisis there was no pressing need to involve private labs, academic institutions, hospitals and global health organizations also capable of developing tests.

Yet some were concerned that the CDC test would not be enough. Stephen Hahn, the FDA commissioner, sought authority in early February to begin calling private diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies to enlist their help.

But when senior FDA officials consulted leaders at HHS, Hahn, who had led the agency for about two months, was told to stand down. There were concerns about him personally contacting companies regulated by his agency.

At that point, Azar, the HHS secretary, seemed committed to a plan he was pursuing that would keep his agency at the center of the response effort: securing a test from the CDC and then building a national coronavirus surveillance system by relying on an existing network of labs used to track the ordinary flu.

In task force meetings, Azar and Redfield pushed for $100 million to fund the plan, but were shot down because of the cost, according to a document outlining the testing strategy obtained by The Washington Post.

Relying so heavily on the CDC would have been problematic even if it had succeeded in quickly developing an effective test that could be distributed across the country. The scale of the epidemic, and the need for mass testing far beyond the capabilities of the flu network, would have overwhelmed Azar’s plan, which didn’t envision engaging commercial lab companies for up to six months.

The effort collapsed when the CDC failed its basic assignment to create a working test and the task force rejected Azar’s plan.

On Feb. 6, when the World Health Organization reported that it was shipping 250,000 test kits to labs around the world, the CDC began distributing 90 kits to a smattering of state-run health labs.

Almost immediately, the state facilities encountered problems. The results were inconclusive in trial runs at more than half the labs, meaning they couldn’t be relied upon to diagnose actual patients. The CDC issued a stopgap measure, instructing labs to send tests to its headquarters in Atlanta, a practice that would delay results for days.

The scarcity of effective tests led officials to impose constraints on when and how to use them, and delayed surveillance testing. Initial guidelines were so restrictive that states were discouraged from testing patients exhibiting symptoms unless they had traveled to China and come into contact with a confirmed case, when the pathogen had by that point almost certainly spread more broadly into the general population.
The limits left top officials largely blind to the true dimensions of the outbreak.
In a meeting in the Situation Room in mid-February, Fauci and Redfield told White House officials that there was no evidence yet of worrisome person-to-person transmission in the United States. In hindsight, it appears almost certain that the virus was taking hold in communities at that point. But even the country’s top experts had little meaningful data about the domestic dimensions of the threat. Fauci later conceded that as they learned more their views changed.

At the same time the president’s subordinates were growing increasingly alarmed, Trump continued to exhibit little concern. On Feb. 10, he held a political rally in New Hampshire attended by thousands where he declared that “by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

The New Hampshire rally was one of eight that Trump held after he had been told by Azar about the coronavirus, a period when he also went to his golf courses six times.
A day earlier, on Feb. 9, a group of governors in town for a black-tie gala at the White House secured a private meeting with Fauci and Redfield. The briefing rattled many of the governors, bearing little resemblance to the words of the president. “The doctors and the scientists, they were telling us then exactly what they are saying now,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said.

That month, federal medical and public health officials were emailing increasingly dire forecasts amongst themselves, with one Veterans Affairs medical adviser warning, ‘We are flying blind,’” according to emails obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight.

Later in February, U.S. officials discovered indications that the CDC laboratory was failing to meet basic quality-control standards. On a Feb. 27 conference call with a range of health officials, a senior FDA official lashed out at the CDC for its repeated lapses.

Jeffrey Shuren, the FDA’s director for devices and radiological health, told the CDC that if it were subjected to the same scrutiny as a privately run lab, “I would shut you down.”

On Feb. 29, a Washington state man became the first American to die of a coronavirus infection. That same day, the FDA released guidance, signaling that private labs were free to proceed in developing their own diagnostics.
Another four-week stretch had been squandered.

One week later, on March 6, Trump toured the facilities at the CDC wearing a red “Keep America Great” hat. He boasted that the CDC tests were nearly perfect and that “anybody who wants a test will get a test,” a promise that nearly a month later remains unmet.

Current and former officials said that Kadlec, Fauci, Redfield and others have repeatedly had to divert their attentions from core operations to contend with ill-conceived requests from the White House they don’t believe they can ignore. And Azar, who once ran the response, has since been sidelined, with his agency disempowered in decision-making and his performance pilloried by a range of White House officials, including Kushner.

“Right now Fauci is trying to roll out the most ambitious clinical trial ever implemented” to hasten the development of a vaccine, said a former senior administration official in frequent touch with former colleagues. And yet, the nation’s top health officials “are getting calls from the White House or Jared’s team asking, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to do this with Oracle?’ ”

If the coronavirus has exposed the country’s misplaced confidence in its ability to handle a crisis, it also has cast harsh light on the limits of Trump’s approach to the presidency — his disdain for facts, science and experience.

He has survived other challenges to his presidency — including the Russia investigation and impeachment — by fiercely contesting the facts arrayed against him and trying to control the public’s understanding of events with streams of falsehoods.

The coronavirus may be the first crisis Trump has faced in office where the facts — the thousands of mounting deaths and infections — are so devastatingly evident that they defy these tactics.

After months of dismissing the severity of the coronavirus, resisting calls for austere measures to contain it, and recasting himself as a wartime president, Trump seemed finally to succumb to the coronavirus reality. In a meeting with a Republican ally in the Oval Office last month, the president said his campaign no longer mattered because his reelection would hinge on his coronavirus response.

“It’s absolutely critical for the American people to follow the guidelines for the next 30 days,” he said at his March 31 news conference. “It’s a matter of life and death.”

[TSA]

In a development that should surprise nobody, especially at this particular time:

Trump fires intelligence community watchdog who defied him on whistleblower complaint
The president informed Congress of the move in a Friday-evening letter to the House and Senate intelligence committees.

President Donald Trump has fired the intelligence community’s chief watchdog, Michael Atkinson, who was the first to sound the alarm to Congress last September about an “urgent” complaint he received from an intelligence official involving Trump’s communications with Ukraine’s president.

Atkinson's decision set in motion the congressional probe that culminated in Trump's impeachment and ultimate acquittal in a bruising political and legal drama that consumed Washington for months.

Trump formally notified the Senate and House Intelligence Committees of his intention to fire Atkinson, to take effect 30 days from Friday, according to two congressional officials and a copy of the letter obtained by POLITICO dated April 3.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/trump-fires-intelligence-community-inspector-general-164287

The timing of the firing seems to coincide with Horowitz interrupting his own FISA audit on March 30th with this memo and the fact that Atkinson had served as an Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General and Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice since 2016. Atkinson was the top lawyer at the National Security Division when all of the Page FISA’s were processed.

https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2020/a20047.pdf

[ChumpDumper]

The timing of the firing seems to coincide with Horowitz interrupting his own FISA audit on March 30th with this memo and the fact that Atkinson had served as an Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General and Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice since 2016. Atkinson was the top lawyer at the National Security Division when all of the Page FISA’s were processed.

https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2020/a20047.pdf:lol no it doesn't

It coincides with a Friday news dump during a pandemic, rube.

1246435229700587524

But PLEASE tell us how IGs are bad now.

Looking forward to it.

[TSA]

But the secretary, who had a strained relationship with Trump and many others in the administration, assured the president that those responsible were working on and monitoring the issue. Azar told several associates that the president believed he was “alarmist” and Azar struggled to get Trump’s attention to focus on the issue, even asking one confidant for advice.
Within days, there were new causes for alarm.

On Jan. 21, a Seattle man who had recently traveled to Wuhan tested positive for the coronavirus, becoming the first known infection on U.S. soil. Then, two days later, Chinese authorities took the drastic step of shutting down Wuhan, turning the teeming metropolis into a ghost city of empty highways and shuttered skyscrapers, with millions of people marooned in their homes.

“That was like, whoa!,” said a senior U.S. official involved in White House meetings on the crisis. “That was when the Richter scale hit 8.”
It was also when U.S. officials began to confront the failings of their own efforts to respond.

Azar, who had served in senior positions at HHS through crises including the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the outbreak of Bird Flu in 2005, was intimately familiar with the playbook for crisis management.

He instructed subordinates to move rapidly to establish a nationwide surveillance system to track the spread of the coronavirus — a stepped-up version of what the CDC does every year to monitor new strains of the ordinary flu.

But doing so would require assets that would elude U.S. officials for months — a diagnostic test that could accurately identify those infected with the new virus and be produced on a mass scale for rapid deployment across the United States, and money to implement the system.

Azar’s team also hit another obstacle. The Chinese were still refusing to share the viral samples they had collected and were using to develop their own tests. In frustration, U.S. officials looked for other possible routes.
A biocontainment lab at the University of Texas medical branch in Galveston had a research partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Kadlec, who knew the Galveston lab director, hoped scientists could arrange a transaction on their own without government interference. At first, the lab in Wuhan agreed, but officials in Beijing intervened Jan. 24 and blocked any lab-to-lab transfer.

There is no indication that officials sought to escalate the matter or enlist Trump to intervene. In fact, Trump has consistently praised Chinese President Xi Jinping despite warnings from U.S. intelligence and health officials that Beijing was concealing the true scale of the outbreak and impeding cooperation on key fronts.
The CDC had issued its first public alert about the coronavirus Jan. 8, and by the 17th was monitoring major airports in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, where large numbers of passengers arrived each day from China.

But in other ways, the situation was already spinning out of control, with multiplying cases in Seattle, intransigence by the Chinese, mounting questions from the public, and nothing in place to stop infected travelers from arriving from abroad.
Trump was out of the country for this critical stretch, taking part in the annual global economic forum in Davos, Switzerland. He was accompanied by a contingent of top officials including national security adviser Robert O’Brien, who took an anxious trans-Atlantic call from Azar.

Azar told O’Brien that it was “mayhem” at the White House, with HHS officials being pressed to provide nearly identical briefings to three audiences on the same day.
Azar urged O’Brien to have the NSC assert control over a matter with potential implications for air travel, immigration authorities, the State Department and the Pentagon. O’Brien seemed to grasp the urgency, and put his deputy, Matthew Pottinger, who had worked in China as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, in charge of coordinating the still-nascent U.S. response.

But the rising anxiety within the administration appeared not to register with the president. On Jan. 22, Trump received his first question about the coronavirus in an interview on CNBC while in Davos. Asked whether he was worried about a potential pandemic, Trump said, “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. . . . It’s going to be just fine.”

Spreading uncontrollably
The move by the NSC to seize control of the response marked an opportunity to reorient U.S. strategy around containing the virus where possible and procuring resources that hospitals would need in any U.S. outbreak, including such basic equipment as protective masks and ventilators.

But instead of mobilizing for what was coming, U.S. officials seemed more preoccupied with logistical problems, including how to evacuate Americans from China.

In Washington, then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Pottinger began convening meetings at the White House with senior officials from HHS, the CDC and the State Department.

The group, which included Azar, Pottinger and Fauci, as well as nine others across the administration, formed the core of what would become the administration’s coronavirus task force. But it primarily focused on efforts to keep infected people in China from traveling to the United States even while evacuating thousands of U.S. citizens. The meetings did not seriously focus on testing or supplies, which have since become the administration’s most challenging problems.
The task force was formally announced on Jan. 29.

“The genesis of this group was around border control and repatriation,” said a senior official involved in the meetings. “It wasn’t a comprehensive, whole-of-government group to run everything.”

The State Department agenda dominated those early discussions, according to participants. Officials began making plans to charter aircraft to evacuate 6,000 Americans stranded in Wuhan. They also debated language for travel advisories that State could issue to discourage other travel in and out of China.

On Jan. 29, Mulvaney chaired a meeting in the White House Situation Room in which officials debated moving travel restrictions to “Level 4,” meaning a “do not travel” advisory from the State Department. Then, the next day, China took the draconian step of locking down the entire Hubei province, which encompasses Wuhan.

That move by Beijing finally prompted a commensurate action by the Trump administration. On Jan. 31, Azar announced restrictions barring any non-U.S. citizen who had been in China during the preceding two weeks from entering the United States.

Trump has, with some justification, pointed to the China-related restriction as evidence that he had responded aggressively and early to the outbreak. It was among the few intervention options throughout the crisis that played to the instincts of the president, who often seems fixated on erecting borders and keeping foreigners out of the country.

But by that point, 300,000 people had come into the United States from China over the previous month. There were only 7,818 confirmed cases around the world at the end of January, according to figures released by the World Health Organization — but it is now clear that the virus was spreading uncontrollably.

Pottinger was by then pushing for another travel ban, this time restricting the flow of travelers from Italy and other nations in the European Union that were rapidly emerging as major new nodes of the outbreak. Pottinger’s proposal was endorsed by key health-care officials, including Fauci, who argued that it was critical to close off any path the virus might take into the country.

This time, the plan met with resistance from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and others who worried about the impact on the U.S. economy. It was an early sign of tension in an area that would split the administration, pitting those who prioritized public health against those determined to avoid any disruption in an election year to the run of expansion and employment growth.

Those backing the economy prevailed with the president. And it was more than a month before the administration issued a belated and confusing ban on flights into the United States from Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people crossed the Atlantic during that interval.

A wall of resistance
While fights over air travel played out in the White House, public health officials began to panic over a startling shortage of critical medical equipment including protective masks for doctors and nurses, as well as a rapidly shrinking pool of money needed to pay for such things.

By early February, the administration was quickly draining a $105 million congressional fund to respond to infectious disease outbreaks. The coronavirus threat to the United States still seemed distant if not entirely hypothetical to much of the public. But to health officials charged with stockpiling supplies for worst-case-scenarios, disaster appeared increasingly inevitable.

A national stockpile of N95 protective masks, gowns, gloves and other supplies was already woefully inadequate after years of underfunding. The prospects for replenishing that store were suddenly threatened by the unfolding crisis in China, which disrupted offshore supply chains.

Much of the manufacturing of such equipment had long since migrated to China, where factories were now shuttered because workers were on order to stay in their households. At the same time, China was buying up masks and other gear to gird for its own coronavirus outbreak, driving up costs and monopolizing supplies.

In late January and early February, leaders at HHS sent two letters to the White House Office of Management and Budget asking to use its transfer authority to shift $136 million of department funds into pools that could be tapped for combating the coronavirus. Azar and his aides also began raising the need for a multibillion-dollar supplemental budget request to send to Congress.

Yet White House budget hawks argued that appropriating too much money at once when there were only a few U.S. cases would be viewed as alarmist.
Joe Grogan, head of the Domestic Policy Council, clashed with health officials over preparedness. He mistrusted how the money would be used and questioned how health officials had used previous preparedness funds.

Azar then spoke to Russell Vought, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, during Trump’s State of the Union speech on Feb. 4. Vought seemed amenable, and told Azar to submit a proposal.

Azar did so the next day, drafting a supplemental request for more than $4 billion, a sum that OMB officials and others at the White House greeted as an outrage. Azar arrived at the White House that day for a tense meeting in the Situation Room that erupted in a shouting match, according to three people familiar with the incident.
A deputy in the budget office accused Azar of preemptively lobbying Congress for a gigantic sum that White House officials had no interest in granting. Azar bristled at the criticism and defended the need for an emergency infusion. But his standing with White House officials, already shaky before the coronavirus crisis began, was damaged further.

White House officials relented to a degree weeks later as the feared coronavirus surge in the United States began to materialize. The OMB team whittled Azar’s demands down to $2.5 billion, money that would be available only in the current fiscal year. Congress ignored that figure, approving an $8 billion supplemental bill that Trump signed into law March 7.

But again, delays proved costly. The disputes meant that the United States missed a narrow window to stockpile ventilators, masks and other protective gear before the administration was bidding against many other desperate nations, and state officials fed up with federal failures began scouring for supplies themselves.

In late March, the administration ordered 10,000 ventilators — far short of what public health officials and governors said was needed. And many will not arrive until the summer or fall, when models expect the pandemic to be receding.
“It’s actually kind of a joke,” said one administration official involved in deliberations about the belated purchase.

Inconclusive tests
Although viruses travel unseen, public health officials have developed elaborate ways of mapping and tracking their movements. Stemming an outbreak or slowing a pandemic in many ways comes down to the ability to quickly divide the population into those who are infected and those who are not.

Doing so, however, hinges on having an accurate test to diagnose patients and deploy it rapidly to labs across the country. The time it took to accomplish that in the United States may have been more costly to American efforts than any other failing.

“If you had the testing, you could say, ‘Oh my god, there’s circulating virus in Seattle, let’s jump on it. There’s circulating virus in Chicago, let’s jump on it,’ ” said a senior administration official involved in battling the outbreak. “We didn’t have that visibility.”

The first setback came when China refused to share samples of the virus, depriving U.S. researchers of supplies to bombard with drugs and therapies in a search for ways to defeat it. But even when samples had been procured, the U.S. effort was hampered by systemic problems and institutional hubris.

Among the costliest errors was a misplaced assessment by top health officials that the outbreak would probably be limited in scale inside the United States — as had been the case with every other infection for decades — and that the CDC could be trusted on its own to develop a coronavirus diagnostic test.

The CDC, launched in the 1940s to contain an outbreak of malaria in the southern United States, had taken the lead on the development of diagnostic tests in major outbreaks including Ebola, Zika and H1N1. But the CDC was not built to mass-produce tests.

The CDC’s success had fostered an institutional arrogance, a sense that even in the face of a potential crisis there was no pressing need to involve private labs, academic institutions, hospitals and global health organizations also capable of developing tests.

Yet some were concerned that the CDC test would not be enough. Stephen Hahn, the FDA commissioner, sought authority in early February to begin calling private diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies to enlist their help.

But when senior FDA officials consulted leaders at HHS, Hahn, who had led the agency for about two months, was told to stand down. There were concerns about him personally contacting companies regulated by his agency.

At that point, Azar, the HHS secretary, seemed committed to a plan he was pursuing that would keep his agency at the center of the response effort: securing a test from the CDC and then building a national coronavirus surveillance system by relying on an existing network of labs used to track the ordinary flu.

In task force meetings, Azar and Redfield pushed for $100 million to fund the plan, but were shot down because of the cost, according to a document outlining the testing strategy obtained by The Washington Post.

Relying so heavily on the CDC would have been problematic even if it had succeeded in quickly developing an effective test that could be distributed across the country. The scale of the epidemic, and the need for mass testing far beyond the capabilities of the flu network, would have overwhelmed Azar’s plan, which didn’t envision engaging commercial lab companies for up to six months.

The effort collapsed when the CDC failed its basic assignment to create a working test and the task force rejected Azar’s plan.

On Feb. 6, when the World Health Organization reported that it was shipping 250,000 test kits to labs around the world, the CDC began distributing 90 kits to a smattering of state-run health labs.

Almost immediately, the state facilities encountered problems. The results were inconclusive in trial runs at more than half the labs, meaning they couldn’t be relied upon to diagnose actual patients. The CDC issued a stopgap measure, instructing labs to send tests to its headquarters in Atlanta, a practice that would delay results for days.

The scarcity of effective tests led officials to impose constraints on when and how to use them, and delayed surveillance testing. Initial guidelines were so restrictive that states were discouraged from testing patients exhibiting symptoms unless they had traveled to China and come into contact with a confirmed case, when the pathogen had by that point almost certainly spread more broadly into the general population.
The limits left top officials largely blind to the true dimensions of the outbreak.
In a meeting in the Situation Room in mid-February, Fauci and Redfield told White House officials that there was no evidence yet of worrisome person-to-person transmission in the United States. In hindsight, it appears almost certain that the virus was taking hold in communities at that point. But even the country’s top experts had little meaningful data about the domestic dimensions of the threat. Fauci later conceded that as they learned more their views changed.

At the same time the president’s subordinates were growing increasingly alarmed, Trump continued to exhibit little concern. On Feb. 10, he held a political rally in New Hampshire attended by thousands where he declared that “by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

The New Hampshire rally was one of eight that Trump held after he had been told by Azar about the coronavirus, a period when he also went to his golf courses six times.
A day earlier, on Feb. 9, a group of governors in town for a black-tie gala at the White House secured a private meeting with Fauci and Redfield. The briefing rattled many of the governors, bearing little resemblance to the words of the president. “The doctors and the scientists, they were telling us then exactly what they are saying now,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said.

That month, federal medical and public health officials were emailing increasingly dire forecasts amongst themselves, with one Veterans Affairs medical adviser warning, ‘We are flying blind,’” according to emails obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight.

Later in February, U.S. officials discovered indications that the CDC laboratory was failing to meet basic quality-control standards. On a Feb. 27 conference call with a range of health officials, a senior FDA official lashed out at the CDC for its repeated lapses.

Jeffrey Shuren, the FDA’s director for devices and radiological health, told the CDC that if it were subjected to the same scrutiny as a privately run lab, “I would shut you down.”

On Feb. 29, a Washington state man became the first American to die of a coronavirus infection. That same day, the FDA released guidance, signaling that private labs were free to proceed in developing their own diagnostics.
Another four-week stretch had been squandered.

One week later, on March 6, Trump toured the facilities at the CDC wearing a red “Keep America Great” hat. He boasted that the CDC tests were nearly perfect and that “anybody who wants a test will get a test,” a promise that nearly a month later remains unmet.

Current and former officials said that Kadlec, Fauci, Redfield and others have repeatedly had to divert their attentions from core operations to contend with ill-conceived requests from the White House they don’t believe they can ignore. And Azar, who once ran the response, has since been sidelined, with his agency disempowered in decision-making and his performance pilloried by a range of White House officials, including Kushner.

“Right now Fauci is trying to roll out the most ambitious clinical trial ever implemented” to hasten the development of a vaccine, said a former senior administration official in frequent touch with former colleagues. And yet, the nation’s top health officials “are getting calls from the White House or Jared’s team asking, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to do this with Oracle?’ ”

If the coronavirus has exposed the country’s misplaced confidence in its ability to handle a crisis, it also has cast harsh light on the limits of Trump’s approach to the presidency — his disdain for facts, science and experience.

He has survived other challenges to his presidency — including the Russia investigation and impeachment — by fiercely contesting the facts arrayed against him and trying to control the public’s understanding of events with streams of falsehoods.

The coronavirus may be the first crisis Trump has faced in office where the facts — the thousands of mounting deaths and infections — are so devastatingly evident that they defy these tactics.

After months of dismissing the severity of the coronavirus, resisting calls for austere measures to contain it, and recasting himself as a wartime president, Trump seemed finally to succumb to the coronavirus reality. In a meeting with a Republican ally in the Oval Office last month, the president said his campaign no longer mattered because his reelection would hinge on his coronavirus response.

“It’s absolutely critical for the American people to follow the guidelines for the next 30 days,” he said at his March 31 news conference. “It’s a matter of life and death.”

Thanks for the article and sorry for quoting it. Most comprehensive one I’ve read on the situation.

[picnroll]

Thanks for the article and sorry for quoting it. Most comprehensive one I’ve read on the situation.

If this administration had led World War II efforts we’d all be speaking German. I guess Thread would be happy.

[Thread]

If this administration had led World War II efforts we’d all be speaking German. I guess Thread would be happy.

I'd be happy if you told me about you fucking your mother some more. Got a big bush, does she? A nice hairy one, perhaps.

[picnroll]

Gotta say I love this ignore feature.

[Thread]

Gotta say I love this ignore feature.

But, I [Ignore] no one.

It's my religion.

Now, have you ever sneaked a peek at your mother's coochie, picky?

[Winehole23]

In a development that should surprise nobody, especially at this particular time:

Trump fires intelligence community watchdog who defied him on whistleblower complaint
The president informed Congress of the move in a Friday-evening letter to the House and Senate intelligence committees.

President Donald Trump has fired the intelligence community’s chief watchdog, Michael Atkinson, who was the first to sound the alarm to Congress last September about an “urgent” complaint he received from an intelligence official involving Trump’s communications with Ukraine’s president.

Atkinson's decision set in motion the congressional probe that culminated in Trump's impeachment and ultimate acquittal in a bruising political and legal drama that consumed Washington for months.

Trump formally notified the Senate and House Intelligence Committees of his intention to fire Atkinson, to take effect 30 days from Friday, according to two congressional officials and a copy of the letter obtained by POLITICO dated April 3.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/trump-fires-intelligence-community-inspector-general-164287Announced at 10pm on a Friday during a national emergency, hoping fewer would notice the retaliation.

[Thread]

Announced at 10pm on a Friday during a national emergency, hoping fewer would notice the retaliation.

Your side dumps on Friday nights as well. You've nary room.

[Spurs Homer]

If this administration had led World War II efforts we’d all be speaking German. I guess Thread would be happy.

thanks for that article...

when the 9-11 style commission begins gathering evidence- there will be a LOT more than these incriminating facts pointed out-

and all those sources and witnesses will be compelled to testify-


i think FOX news and trump and the GOP - should be sued by everyone losing family and friends to this pandemic - due to the criminal and negligent response led by trump

and led by a sick cult.

[Thread]

thanks for that article...

when the 9-11 style commission begins gathering evidence- there will be a LOT more than these incriminating facts pointed out-

and all those sources and witnesses will be compelled to testify-


i think FOX news and trump and the GOP - should be sued by everyone losing family and friends to this pandemic - due to the criminal and negligent response led by trump

and led by a sick cult.

You can count on that, daddy-O. That's the cottage industry comin' up fast.

[Spurs Homer]

You can count on that, daddy-O. That's the cottage industry comin' up fast.


pesky facts will be exposed


here is a thought for “future thread” (future you)

As i see the facts uncovered by this nonpartisan commission-

I recognize that these facts are damning to the man I supported and defended.

The FACTS are that he was/is a really evil criminal-

yet I defended him and his evil criminal actions 24/7. i staked my own life on his evil criminal acts.


Why did I?

[Thread]

pesky facts will be exposed


here is a thought for “future thread” (future you)

As i see the facts uncovered by this nonpartisan commission-

I recognize that these facts are damning to the man I supported and defended.

The FACTS are that he was/is a really evil criminal-

yet I defended him and his evil criminal actions 24/7. i staked my own life on his evil criminal acts.


Why did I?

tee, hee.

[Spurs Homer]

tee, hee.

that is where we are headed-

the same as the 9-11 commission-


this will not be a “congressional” shitshow


this is going to be like the 9-11 deal-

to yours and your teams disappointment

this wont be something you can just call fake news and blind yourself again -

this will be a true reckoning

[Thread]

that is where we are headed-

the same as the 9-11 commission-


this will not be a “congressional” shitshow


this is going to be like the 9-11 deal-

to yours and your teams disappointment

this wont be something you can just call fake news and blind yourself again -

this will be a true reckoning

- "Promises, promises."

- Ernie "The Cat" Ladd

[Chris]

https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1246547204455759872?s=19

good lord :lol

[Chris]

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1246522958421639168?s=19

[Thread]

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1246522958421639168?s=19

---45---

[Thread]

https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1246547204455759872?s=19

good lord
:lol

[boutons_deux]

‘It’s not like we have a massive recession or worse,’ :lol

says Trump after millions lose their jobs

“It’s artificial because we turned it off,”

Trump said of the economic crisis, a distinction that makes no difference to the millions who have lost their jobs and their health insurance.

Trump downplayed :lol the intensifying economic downturn as “an artificial closing” :lol and

insisted that businesses like restaurants will be “bigger and better” than before once the COVID-19 crisis subsides. :lol

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/its-not-like-we-have-a-massive-recession-or-worse-says-trump-after-millions-lose-their-jobs/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4201 (https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/its-not-like-we-have-a-massive-recession-or-worse-says-trump-after-millions-lose-their-jobs/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4201)

[boutons_deux]

Presidential

‘Somebody ought to sue his ass off’:

Trump bashes fired intel Inspector General for Ukraine whistleblower report


https://www.rawstory.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/donald-trump-cpac.jpg

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/somebody-ought-to-sue-his-ass-off-trump-bashes-fired-intel-inspector-general-for-ukraine-whistleblower-report/

Trash is garbage, a piece of human shit

[Thread]

Presidential

‘Somebody ought to sue his ass off’:

Trump bashes fired intel Inspector General for Ukraine whistleblower report


https://www.rawstory.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/donald-trump-cpac.jpg

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/somebody-ought-to-sue-his-ass-off-trump-bashes-fired-intel-inspector-general-for-ukraine-whistleblower-report/

Trash is garbage, a piece of human shit







He made President though, by God.

ha, ha.

[Thread]

‘It’s not like we have a massive recession or worse,’ :lol

says Trump after millions lose their jobs

“It’s artificial because we turned it off,”

Trump said of the economic crisis, a distinction that makes no difference to the millions who have lost their jobs and their health insurance.

Trump downplayed :lol the intensifying economic downturn as “an artificial closing” :lol and

insisted that businesses like restaurants will be “bigger and better” than before once the COVID-19 crisis subsides. :lol

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/its-not-like-we-have-a-massive-recession-or-worse-says-trump-after-millions-lose-their-jobs/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4201 (https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/its-not-like-we-have-a-massive-recession-or-worse-says-trump-after-millions-lose-their-jobs/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4201)




Stands to reason. Wrecked his shit to do it, but, with broad daylight all around him he had nary other choice.

D's want to keep this lid on it till November, so, they'll be fighting hammer & tong to do everything in their power to make that happen.
All he can do is keep the pom-pom's twirling like today & every day at the briefings. Those briefings are a Godsend & cost him nary a dime. Those briefings keep his dauber up, his blood from coagulatin'. Sure, he blubbers a bit as it carries on, but, he's soldiering in the finest traditions, showing us, his base how it's done, teaching us the ropes, how to slay our enemies.

"The forgotten men and women of America will be forgotten no longer." - the old man.

A better President has never walked the face of this earth.

"God bless the United States of America and the men who made her free." - Daniel Webster

[Thread]

https://youtu.be/Elz8EaGH9k0

---I Will Always Love You---

It'd a destroyed me to suffer Bill & Hillary Clinton again.

Let us proceed...

[boutons_deux]

l'apres golf, Trash at ease


https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0?ui=2&ik=c5ffe9fe07&attid=0.1&permmsgid=msg-a:r8499702381439525809&th=1714b795e954ef65&view=fimg&sz=s0-l75-ft&attbid=ANGjdJ_9_UAB4LGG7RZHyKzguVaX4Pj1AqbH7bYpjaQ XdyE89Y9W_ptchkuAqMYnW8LBSKIZGPmGG34FWa7YyaHDE8Svn T_T4HL0kv7FPQin-rx_6KSfFAJg7iw7j_0&disp=emb&realattid=ii_k8ncg1zc0

[spurraider21]

In a development that should surprise nobody, especially at this particular time:

Trump fires intelligence community watchdog who defied him on whistleblower complaint
The president informed Congress of the move in a Friday-evening letter to the House and Senate intelligence committees.

President Donald Trump has fired the intelligence community’s chief watchdog, Michael Atkinson, who was the first to sound the alarm to Congress last September about an “urgent” complaint he received from an intelligence official involving Trump’s communications with Ukraine’s president.

Atkinson's decision set in motion the congressional probe that culminated in Trump's impeachment and ultimate acquittal in a bruising political and legal drama that consumed Washington for months.

Trump formally notified the Senate and House Intelligence Committees of his intention to fire Atkinson, to take effect 30 days from Friday, according to two congressional officials and a copy of the letter obtained by POLITICO dated April 3.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/trump-fires-intelligence-community-inspector-general-164287
doing this while everybody is distracted by covid, no less

amazing seeing all the "small government" people cheering on for somebody who strives for authoritarianism more than any president in memory

[boutons_deux]

amazing seeing all the "small government" people cheering on for somebody who strives for authoritarianism more than any president in memory

the "small govt" propaganda and indoctrination doesn't mean no govt.

It means to enfeeble the govt into dysfunction, drown-able in a bathtub, so the oligarchy can complete its coup d'etat and

install an unchallengeable authoritarian Repug govt AND judiciary that run the country of the oligarchy, by the oligarchy, for the oligarchy.

iow, small govt means, and already does as both parties are whores to the oligarchy's BigDollar, no more govt even acknowledging the mythical "of the people, by the people, for the people".

=============

Under the cover of the pandemic, "never let a crisis go to waste" criminal AG Barr wanted to add another brick to the authoritarian wall

DOJ seeks new emergency powers amid coronavirus pandemic

One of the requests to Congress would allow the department to petition a judge to

indefinitely detain someone during an emergency.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/21/doj-coronavirus-emergency-powers-140023 (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/21/doj-coronavirus-emergency-powers-140023)

who defines an emergency? DoJ

which judge to petition? one of the reliably compliant, rightwing ideologues that Leo/McConnell have been installing in bunches with no Senate hearing

who defines "someone" to detain? the authoritarian DoJ working for the oligarchy

[boutons_deux]

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0?ui=2&ik=c5ffe9fe07&attid=0.1&permmsgid=msg-a:r4833380146964912404&th=171521e135d3bf7e&view=fimg&sz=s0-l75-ft&attbid=ANGjdJ_bkS8J7tO5DmnyQQqVhjvly54TH9b12CNzROP 1sc27PRvcYHqGmkMEDHsKV83KVaMRgcxzYUYJpD8Pp7groG6c5 qNtQSofxib-q_IMqmI6ZMMoOdcRRuukSjg&disp=emb&realattid=ii_k8p6t2ay0

[boutons_deux]

Military vets say Trump’s acting Navy secretary ‘spit on their service’ with attack on fired captain

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/military-vets-say-trumps-acting-navy-secretary-spit-on-their-service-with-attack-on-fired-captain/ (https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/military-vets-say-trumps-acting-navy-secretary-spit-on-their-service-with-attack-on-fired-captain/)

[ChumpDumper]

1247526756854034433

:lol why is that still a job in the Dennison administration?

[Winehole23]

1247526756854034433

:lol why is that still a job in the Dennison administration?The boss likes to see himself buttered up on Fox News.

[pgardn]

1247526756854034433

:lol why is that still a job in the Dennison administration?

Exactly.
He holds his own whimsical press conferences and he won’t be cornered in a room of really persistent press as he contradicts himself so often.
So here is how confused orange describes the situation:

"We've done a poor job on press relationships, and I guess, I don't know who to blame for that," Trump said. "Maybe I can blame ourselves for that. I will blame ourselves. But I think we've done a great job. I think we've done a poor job in terms of press relationship."


Seriously, if you read this closely it’s FUBAR.

[Splits]

1247548322174439424

[picnroll]

Trump removes independent watchdog for coronavirus funds, upending oversight panel
The move comes as Trump makes a broad push against inspectors general scrutinizing his actions.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/07/trump-removes-independent-watchdog-for-coronavirus-funds-upending-oversight-panel-171943

[Thread]

Trump removes independent watchdog for coronavirus funds, upending oversight panel
The move comes as Trump makes a broad push against inspectors general scrutinizing his actions.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/07/trump-removes-independent-watchdog-for-coronavirus-funds-upending-oversight-panel-171943

When you make President you get to do Presidential things, picky.

[Thread]

Exactly.
He holds his own whimsical press conferences and he won’t be cornered in a room of really persistent press as he contradicts himself so often.
So here is how confused orange describes the situation:

"We've done a poor job on press relationships, and I guess, I don't know who to blame for that," Trump said. "Maybe I can blame ourselves for that. I will blame ourselves. But I think we've done a great job. I think we've done a poor job in terms of press relationship."


Seriously, if you read this closely it’s FUBAR.

All CNN/MSNBC did was bitch about no press briefings. Now, they're both cutting away from them daily. Why?

Simple, the old man discovered a venue for his rallies. tee, hee.

"Who's the wild man now!"

[picnroll]

When you make President you get to do Presidential things, picky.

You mean like dodge accountability so you can line you and your buddies’ pockets?

[Thread]

You mean like dodge accountability so you can line you and your buddies’ pockets?

Obama did it for 8 years, Bush2 the preceding 8.

What's good for the goose is sauce for the gander.

[picnroll]

Obama did it for 8 years, Bush2 the preceding 8.

What's good for the goose is sauce for the gander.
So covid was a jackpot for Trump, more money to steal than ever before conceivable. Some conspiracy theorists might even say Trump deliberately let it get out of hand by way of misinformation and inaction to up the jackpot. I won’t go there, I just attribute it to him being stupid.

[Thread]

So covid was a jackpot for Trump, more money to steal than ever before conceivable. Some conspiracy theorists might even say Trump deliberately let it get out of hand by way of misinformation and inaction to up the jackpot. I won’t go there, I just attribute it to him being stupid.

You will though, not today, but, no later than tomorrow.

[picnroll]

You will though, not today, but, no later than tomorrow.

Nope, I’ll stick with he’s an idiot, an opportunistic idiot, but an idiot none the less. He lives off being a promoter and availing himself to crooks.

[DMC]

Nope, I’ll stick with he’s an idiot, an opportunistic idiot, but an idiot none the less. He lives off being a promoter and availing himself to crooks.

A billionaire who became president of the United States Against All Odds. Sure he's an idiot.

[Spurs Homer]

A billionaire who became president of the United States Against All Odds. Sure he's an idiot.

yellow fat hands ...

Defending
Muh.
Criminal.

[picnroll]

A billionaire who became president of the United States Against All Odds. Sure he's an idiot.

Which set of books are we going by that he’s a billionaire, the one he qualifies for loans off of or the one he pays taxes from?

[Thread]

A billionaire who became president of the United States Against All Odds. Sure he's an idiot.

D M C

[clambake]

you dont need to defend and deny, dale. you're a cult member.


just goose-step and lick.


poor poor katie

[Blake]

Obama did it for 8 years, Bush2 the preceding 8.

What's good for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Why are you fine with it?

[Thread]

Why are you fine with it?

Because we ain't changing NOW that the old man is President, just to turn around after he's gone & start it up again. Uh, uh.

It's been fucked since JFK ascended to it & so we'll keep it that-a-way.

[Thread]

you dont need to defend and deny, dale. you're a cult member.


just goose-step and lick.


poor poor katie

...can't you give it a break, clammy? Please.

[DMC]

yellow fat hands ...

Defending
Muh.
Criminal.

Shut up fat prison guard