Friday Talking Points -- Trump Dumbfounded At How Science Works

President Donald Trump seems unclear on a few basic scientific and medical concepts. This isn't really news, of course, since Trump seems unclear on a whole host of things each and every day. But this week's comments on coronavirus testing were more than just a little bit astonishing.

Here is Trump, during a visit to a mask factory, while refusing to wear a mask (even though everyone he met were wearing masks), talking about America's testing efforts (which are now at roughly a third of where the White House promised we would be by the end of March, by the way):

That last bit is hard to translate from Trump's broken English, since it is unclear whether he is saying "the total tests done will go up very, very rapidly" (misstating "10 million" as "10 millionth" ), or whether he was predicting that 10,000,000 testing sites would be open by the end of the month (which is obviously just not going to happen). But we'll give him the benefit of the doubt, we suppose. Trump continued:



Let's ignore Trump's pathetic begging for praise at the end there, and move on to the two gigantic errors in those statements. The first of these is that testing is "frankly, overrated." Overrated? By whom? For what possible reason? Testing is testing -- it is the gathering of scientific data for both individual use ("Do I have the virus, Doc?" ) and for the statisticians who are tracking the infection's spread, both nationally and regionally. On what particular scale is either of these things "rated"? It is what it is, no more and no less.

But the other jaw-droppingly ignorant thing Trump said is even more worrisome: "If we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases." This statement was resoundingly mocked (as it so richly deserved to be) on social media. Representative Don Beyer tweeted:



But even more pithy was S. E. Cupp's reaction:



If the United States didn't do any testing, then it is undoubtedly true that the official numbers of cases would not be "very few" but, in fact, zero. No test results, no official cases -- easy peasy! But, of course, the virus wouldn't care about the official numbers. It would go right on infecting people, because that's what it does. So if we had no tests at all, we'd still have lots of sick people infected with COVID-19, but we just wouldn't know about them. In fact, we'd have millions more infected, because if we hadn't done any tests at all then we wouldn't have shut the country down as we did, and the virus would have spread like wildfire.

Trump also seems clueless when it comes to understanding how people get sick. This is kind of surprising because it was reported previous to the coronavirus outbreak that Trump was a "germophobe." But apparently that was wrong, because he really doesn't seem to understand how sickness travels. Think this is exaggeration? Here is Trump from last week, explaining how two people in the White House had just tested positive:



Seriously? "...and then something happens"? "...and then today, I guess for some reason, she tested positive"???

Trump seems to believe that (1) once you test negative, then you are somehow immune from that point on, and (2) people get infected with the virus because "something happens" and then "for some reason," you test positive. The levels of stupidity and ignorance necessary to say something like that are staggering, even for Trump. After all, he's been absolutely immersed in this crisis for months now, with daily briefings from doctors and scientists, and he still doesn't know how viruses infect people? And he thinks that the tests are the problem with the numbers going up? If he closes his eyes, then you can't see him -- yeah, that's the ticket!

November can't come fast enough.

One particular quote from an article in the Financial Times this week seems pertinent:



If you, like many, are now at the "if I doesn't laugh, I thinks I'm a-gonna cry" stage with our president, we hereby offer up this interlude, a spoof video of the REM song "Losing My Religion," titled "Losing My Civilians" (sample lyrics: "I thought that I heard you coughing... I don't care if you get it. Oh, no, I've said too much." ). Maybe the next REM song someone will parody will be "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)"? It certainly seems appropriate, at this point.

We'll try to get through the other news of the week in abbreviated fashion, since we've got a lot else to cover this week.

Trump tried to have a "mission accomplished" moment at the White House with banners reading: "America leads the world in testing" behind him. Twitter users had some other suggestions for the banners, such as "...in deaths" and one amusing one which changed the entire text to: "Future home of Joe Biden."

This briefing didn't end well, either. Donald Trump told a Chinese-American reporter "you should ask China" in response to her question about why Trump was treating the pandemic as a "global competition." Then Trump called her question "nasty," refused to let the next female reporter that he himself had just called on ask him a question, and ended up by turning around and angrily storming out of the briefing. The media barely even noticed, even though this was incredibly outrageous behavior from a U.S. president.

Both Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Rick Bright testified before congressional hearings this week, which began the long process of uncovering all the details of just how monumental a screwup the Trump pandemic response has been, to date. Bright is the whistleblower who lost his job because he refused to get on Trump's hydroxychloroquine bandwagon, of course. He made this chilling prediction in his opening remarks: "Without clear planning and implementation of the steps that I and other experts have outlined, 2020 will be darkest winter in modern history."

Trump responded by getting annoyed at both of them, because they are saying things he firmly believes are not reality. Which, these days, is about par for the course for Trump.

What else has Trump been up to? It seems the company he's partnering with in Indonesia is digging up a graveyard -- without the permission of all the families involved -- in order to build a new Trump resort. On the site in question, a theme park is planned. You just can't make this stuff up, folks. Last weekend, Trump tweeted out an ad for one of his golf resorts reopening on his official account, because of course he did.

There was some Trump court news this week, as the Supreme Court finally heard the cases dealing with Trump's tax returns, and an appeals court revived the emoluments case against Trump's D.C. hotel. The Supreme Court decision will be handed down by June, so that'll be interesting (unless they somehow find a way to punt it back to the lower courts, which is always a possibility).

The economic news continues to be terrible, with another three million people filing for unemployment last week, bringing the two-month total to a frightening 36.5 million people. Retail sales for April were down a sharp 16.4 percent, which was much higher than economists had anticipated. This was led by retail clothing stores, which were down a whopping 78.8 percent. On the medical front, we're fast approaching 1.5 million cases of COVID-19 in this country, and 90,000 deaths.

Let's see, what else? Jared Kushner just said he is "not sure I can commit" to holding the November election on time, apparently unaware that he does not have some sort of signoff responsibility for it. And Eric Trump amusingly tweeted: "The chips are starting to crumble!" Twitter had a field day with this, with people posted mangled metaphors galore ("Yeah, well, people will do crazy things when the cookies are down..." ). A real chip off the old blockhead, if you will.





Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is (as of this writing) pushing forward for a vote on two important things: another coronavirus aid bill, and changing House rules for the next 45 days to allow for proxy voting, to avoid having to force all members back for each floor vote. Republicans, of course, are blocking both.

The proxy vote move would indeed be historic because it would be the first time that House members weren't required to be physically present to hold votes. But it is obviously an emergency measure with a built-in sunset date (although Pelosi could extend it if circumstances warranted). So it really shouldn't be all that controversial or partisan.

But the aid package is a lot more political. Pelosi was told in the previous round that she had to wait on all the Democratic priorities because the bill had to be hustled through immediately. The Senate tried to jam their partisan bill through, but Pelosi at least put on the brakes and removed the worst parts of it while adding some necessary oversight. So this time, Pelosi is going first. This battle of which house gets to write the aid bill has been going on throughout the crisis, in the background, it bears mentioning. But for some reason, Republicans are now outraged (or they're pretending to be, at any rate).

Pelosi made the right move in going first, for a number of reasons. One, she got to write the bill, so she not only made it big ($3 trillion) but also included things like lots of money for states to run mail-in elections this November, and a trillion dollars to aid state and local governments whose tax base has been decimated by the crisis. All of the major things Pelosi added were things she had been told "we can get to that stuff later" by Mitch McConnell and the White House in all the earlier bills. But this could be the last such bailout bill Congress manages to pass, or the last big one at any rate. So the time is now -- if Democrats don't hold firm for this stuff then the opportunity will be lost.

Pelosi is even getting pushback from progressives who insist that the bill doesn't go far enough (originally, according to Pelosi, it was a $4 trillion bill). In particular, progressives wanted a much better way of getting money to laid-off workers by paying their employers to keep their paychecks flowing through the crisis, but it was not included in the final bill. The window is really closing on when this would actually do a lot of good, as some people have been out of work for over two months now. With another three million filing for unemployment this week, America has lost over 36 million jobs during the past two months -- the biggest decline ever.

Pelosi is going to fight hard to get this bill passed. She knows that if it doesn't, state and local governments are going to have to start laying off firefighters and cops and nurses. Which would be insane, obviously, in the midst of a crisis. But which has already begun to happen across the country.

Of course, even if the bill passes the House, Mitch McConnell intends to ignore it. Which means it will be incumbent on all Democrats to raise the pressure on him until he comes to the negotiating table. Which really shouldn't be all that hard to do, since there are all sorts of things in the bill that the public overwhelmingly supports. If McConnell sticks his head in the sand (right next to Trump) and insists that everything's fine and the crisis is now over ("My head's in the sand, so you can't see me!" ), then he had better pay a political price for doing so. Thankfully, Pelosi already has a strong voice supporting more aid, that of the chair of the Federal Reserve, who this week said: "Additional fiscal support could be costly but worth it if it helps avoid long-term economic damage and leaves us with a stronger recovery." This helps lend urgency to the effort, obviously.

For putting together the next pandemic aid bill in the House and for including most of the Democrats' concerns in the bill, Nancy Pelosi is our Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week.

[Congratulate Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on her House contact page, to let her know you appreciate her efforts.]






This week, the F.B.I. confiscated the phone of Republican Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, because it may have evidence that he broke the law. Members of Congress are barred from trading on insider information they receive in their work, but Burr apparently sold off a whole bunch of stocks right after he was briefed on the severity of the approaching pandemic, months ago. Barr has since stepped down as the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee as a result of the search warrant. Because this turned the media's attention back to the whole insider-trading story, it was also revealed that Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein also turned over documents to law enforcement agencies which she says proves that she didn't share any insider information with her husband, Richard Blum, an investment banker who sold shares of a biotech company in January before the market crashed. So we certainly can't give her an award here yet, but we'll be keeping our eyes on this situation as it develops.

Instead, we are awarding the Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week this week to Christy Smith, who lost a special House election this week in Southern California. The election was held because Katie Hill resigned the seat after a sex scandal, after successfully flipping the district in the blue wave of 2018. The district has now flipped back to the Republicans (Smith lost by 12 points), which is heartening for Republicans who think they'll have a shot at flipping the entire House this November. However, the winner will have to run again in November, and turnout is expected to be a lot higher. So Smith could actually wrest the seat back from the Republicans in less than six months.

Even so, it was indeed disappointing to lose a House seat now. Democrats lost two special elections this week, but the other House seat was in a reliably-red district, so it didn't come as a surprise.

If Christy Smith manages to win in November, it will certainly wipe out the disappointment from this week, but for now Smith is our Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week.

[Christy Smith is now a private citizen running for office, and it's our blanket policy not to provide contact information for candidates or links to campaign sites, sorry.]





Volume 574 (5/15/20)

Before we begin, while we wrote about it yesterday we'd like to again urge everyone to read a very extensive article in the Financial Times (we cited it earlier today, with that "fruits to the volcano" quote). It is a brutal takedown of the rampant incompetence the Trump administration has shown since the crisis began, and is well worth the time it takes to read. Oh, Time magazine also has an interesting article (and an even better cover image) worth checking out, in the same vein.

OK, with that out of the way, let's dive right in to this week's talking points, shall we?



See, it can help you, too!

Since Democrats lost that California special election, they should at least make a pithy point to Republicans about what happened.

"Republicans, from Trump on down, seem scared silly of the concept of mail-in ballots. I have no idea why, since Trump himself votes absentee now. But overall, the GOP seems to think this is somehow a partisan issue that somehow benefits Democrats. This is simply not true -- it is not partisan at all! California just held a special election for a House seat, and President Trump was so worried about it that he tweeted some baseless conspiracy theories about it last weekend. But guess what? In an election conducted largely by mail, the Republican actually won! That's right -- there simply was no partisan bias to voting by mail at all. Which is what Democrats have been saying all along. Democrats want to make it safer and easier for everyone to vote this November. For some bizarre reason, Republicans don't. Even though there is simply no partisan bias to voting by mail, period."



Mitch admits he lied

This is more than Donald Trump has ever done, we have to admit.

"Mitch McConnell just admitted that he outright lied about the Obama administration. He had said in an earlier interview: 'We want to be early, ready for the next one, because clearly the Obama administration did not leave to this administration any kind of game plan for something like this.' Except that was completely false -- the Obama team actually had left Trump a 69-page playbook, which contained 'hundreds of recommendations' for dealing with a pandemic, but Donald Trump threw it into the trash. As whistleblower Rick Bright pointed out, in his testimony to Congress this week: 'It is painfully clear that we were not as prepared as we should have been. We missed early warning signals, and we forgot important pages from our pandemic playbook.' Except that Trump didn't 'forget' them, he ignored them. Bright also added: 'we don't have a single point of leadership right now for this response, and we don't have a master plan for this response.' McConnell at least had the decency to correct the record on Obama later, saying: 'I was wrong. They did leave behind a plan. So, I clearly made a mistake in that regard.' Meanwhile, the White House press secretary had a different spin on things: 'The Obama-Biden paper packet was superseded by a President Trump-style pandemic preparedness response plan. Which was much better.' It was not reported whether reporters in the room broke out into peals of laughter when she uttered that last sentence, however."



Nah, we won't need any masks

Uncovering the rampant incompetence of the Trump pandemic response has only just begun.

"In the future, whole books will no doubt be written detailing the many failings and flailings of the Trump administration when the coronavirus hit America. It may take years to fully understand the depths of the incompetence, in fact. We're just beginning to hear some of these stories, now that Congress is examining all the many mistakes that were made. First and foremost this week was the news that a medical supplies company contacted the White House in January -- in January, mind you -- to get support to open up mothballed production lines to make N95 masks. They could have been churning out 7 million more masks per month by now if this had actually happened. But his request was ignored. Here is an American manufacturer telling the government he is ready and willing to help, and he was sent packing instead. Because the Trump administration didn't think it would need any masks. This is just one story -- there will likely be many more of these uncovered -- which shows how woefully inadequate the Trump administration has been from the very beginning of the crisis."



Are you smarter than a fifth-grader?

He probably lost interest after the first page....

"The C.D.C. tried to do what it is supposed to do in a medical crisis, by drawing up an extensive list of how to safely continue social distancing when reopening the American economy. Their list had pages and pages of detail -- it was reportedly 63 pages long, and contained such helpful advice as suggesting schools separate children's belongings and keeping playgrounds and cafeterias closed. But then Nancy Beck, described as 'a former chemical industry executive nominated to be the nation's top consumer safety watchdog' who is 'not a medical doctor and has no background in virology' derailed the effort, apparently for political reasons. It seems Trump thought the guidelines were 'too restrictive.' So yesterday they instead released a six-page dumbed-down version which tossed out virtually all of the detailed guidelines the doctors and experts had come up with. How can advice from experts be political? Why would anyone even want to make this a political issue? Right when the public is hungry for some intelligent advice from people who know what they're talking about, the C.D.C. is forced to remove 90 percent of its own guidelines for reopening the country, because Trump somehow thinks it'll hurt his chances of being re-elected. This is nothing short of insane."



Even Republicans think Trump's wrong

Everyone sing along: "Macho, macho man. I want to be a macho man..."

"President Donald Trump, and to a lesser extent Vice President Mike Pence, seem to be striving to set the worst possible example they can to the general public. Trump swears he's never going to wear a facemask. So far, he's visited two factories which make facemasks and refused to wear one while meeting people. At a recent meeting of CEOs headed by Mike Pence, an aide walked into the room before Pence and instructed the CEOs to take off the masks they were wearing. Trump and Pence both seem to think this is some sort of test of their manhood, or something. But the public expects their national leaders to... well, lead in a time of crisis, and that includes setting a good example for others to follow. In a recent poll, over seven in ten people said Trump and Pence should be wearing masks when they travel. Only 12 percent said they shouldn't. And even 57 percent of Republicans want to see Trump and Pence wearing masks. So it's really hard to see what Trump thinks he's going to lose by doing so, because even his own voters disagree with his reckless decision."



He refused to act

Team Biden dropped a good ad recently, which hits directly at Donald Trump for his cluelessness. It's such a succinct way to sum up the case against Trump's bungled pandemic response that we decided it was worthy on its own to be a talking point this week:





Trump Death Clock

And finally, a grim new counter appeared in Times Square this week.

"Remember the Debt Clock? There's now a new counter up in Times Square with the grim numbers of people who needlessly died during this pandemic. Since experts have estimated that around 60 percent of the coronavirus deaths are directly attributable to Donald Trump's refusal to act for so long at the start of the crisis, this new Trump Death Clock now counts the sobering total of lives paid for Trump's incompetence. Call it a grim sign of the times."




Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com
Follow Chris on Twitter: ChrisWeigant
Full archives of FTP columns: FridayTalkingPoints.com
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