Caption this picture.

Off the rails.

I think it's safe to say that these daily coronavirus propaganda briefings from the White House are doing way more harm than good for the country. The president holds these briefings at lease once per day, because he can't hold his "Dear Leader" rallies where thousands of...let's just say his red state faithful gather and feed his fragile ego. 

Yesterday's briefing, to put it mildly, went way off the rails. Mr. trump had an epic meltdown on national television, when a CBS reporter (who also happens to be a lawyer) called him out on his lie about doing everything possible to stop this pandemic and saving lives.  Mr. trump became so shook that you could literally see him shaking at one point when the reporter refused to back down. Caught in a lie, and with nothing to back his spurious claims, he reverted to name calling. It was embarrassing to watch. And if you are proud to be an American, watching your president make an absolute fool of himself in such a manner cannot make you feel good about your country. Dr. Fauci, a man who most of us hold in high esteem, also made himself look really small yesterday. The briefing opened with him having to grovel to Dear Leader, and clarify his truthful statements made to Jake Tapper on CNN  the day before.

Mr. trump started the press conference with Fauci, and pretty much told d him to go up there and tell the world why he dared to go on television to make "Dear Leader" look bad. Fauci himself became snippy when a reporter asked him if that's the only reason he went up there. Truth is, we hardly heard from Fauci after that statement, and he sat there for two hours listening to trump's BS propaganda session like a bad student on time-out without hardly a peep.

But that wasn't even the worst of it. "Dear Leader" actually played a video from the press room which was nothing more than a FOX NEWS prepared campaign video. It was filled with lies and misinformation about how Mr. trump handled the coronavirus epidemic. Shockingly, it seemed to have prepared by White House staffers working on our (the taxpayer) dime. Some cable news outlets cut away, and their talking heads declared later that they were "shocked" that the president would do such a thing. You have to wonder what planet they have been living on for the past four years. Nothing that this man says or does should shock them.

At one point yesterday Mr. trump wrongly declared that his power is absolute, and that he has "total authority" to do whatever he wants. I don't want to get into a Constitutional law lecture here, but let's just say that he is wrong. Article II does not give him "absolute power" as he likes to declare. He shares that power with two other co-equal branches of government. He is not a King. It's kind of what this whole Revolution War thing was about.  You can read more about the powers of the Executive branch here.  And here I thought that republicans respected the concept of federalism and the separation of powers.

 “I have the ultimate authority,” the president responded...... “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total and that’s the way it’s got to be. … It’s total. The governors know that.”

Nope, that's not the way "it's got to be".  Maybe come November, Mr. trump will learn the truth the hard way. 

*Image from npr.com

Caption Sunday.

I need a caption for this picture. 

*Image from www.inquirer.com.

These are challenging times, and there is no leader to be found.

This is day... I'm not sure, I lost count....let's say day 14 of my "shelter in place". Social distancing is clearly working here in America, because according to some of the experts thousands more people would die if we weren't taking these mandates seriously.

I say good for you America. I knew we could do it. We will learn to adjust to whatever circumstances we are forced to live in. It's not easy, but, at least for now, we are coping. 

Now of course,  as is always the case in these divided states of America, it's not all good. We knew that their would be some challenges.

"Kip Diggs glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror before heading into the grocery store: a baby-blue bandanna — matching his University of North Carolina baseball cap — masked his nose, mouth and salt-and-pepper beard.

The 53-year-old Nashville marketing consultant had chosen his face covering carefully for his trip to Kroger on Sunday, his first outing since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidelines advising Americans to cover their faces to slow the spread of covid-19.

“As an African American man, I have to be cognizant of the things I do and where I go, so appearances matter,” Diggs said. “I have pink, lime green, Carolina blue so I don’t look menacing. I want to take a lot of that stigma and risk out as best I can.”

A recent report of a police officer following young black men who wore masks while shopping has amplified fears among people of color of being profiled as criminals or gang members. Civil rights leaders, politicians and community activists worry that concerns of racial bias will discourage black people from wearing masks to protect themselves and others, further increasing their exposure to a virus that is disproportionately infecting and killing African Americans. 

“This is a powder keg waiting to take shape. And that is the last thing we need dealing with this pandemic,” said Hardie Davis Jr., mayor of Augusta, Ga., and president of the African American Mayors Association, citing high rates of infection among black residents in cities including Chicago nd Detroit, as well as parts of rural Georgia such as Albany. His association plans to release recommendations this week on how best to communicate CDC guidelines to the black community.

In Wood River, Ill., two black men wearing surgical masks recorded themselves being followed by a police officer as they left a Walmart last month.

“He just followed us from outside, told us that we cannot wear masks,” one of the men said in the video, posted on YouTube on March 18, which shows the officer walking behind the pair with a hand resting on his gun. “The coronavirus is real. This police officer just put us out for wearing masks and trying to be safe.”

The Washington Post could not reach the men for comment, but they described the encounter to the local newspaper as “terrifying” and said they felt the officer was stalking them as if they were “prey.”

Wood River Police Chief Brad Wells told The Post the incident is being investigated internally, with the assistance of the local NAACP branch, after the video drew more than 175,000 views.

Wells said the officer approached the men outside the Walmart on March 15 because he “believed the two individuals to be acting suspiciously.” The officer asked for their identification and erroneously told them that city ordinance prohibited the wearing of masks, Wells said.

“This statement was incorrect and should not have been made,” Wells said in a written statement. “The city does not have such an ordinance prohibiting the wearing of a mask. In fact, I support the wearing of a nonsurgical mask or face covering when in public during the COVID-19 pandemic period.”[Source] 

It's a damn shame! Black men shouldn't have to be making these types of decisions. Whether to risk our lives to go out and get food, or to stay at home and starve to death. Clearly we need the masks to cut down on the chances of contracting the virus, but then, if we wear the masks......well, you just read the article. 

And then there is the challenge of having this current president. This man, who is supposed to be leading this nation through a time of crisis, is actually more concerned with the ratings of his nightly briefings, than he is with the almost 17,000 dead Americans (at the time of this post) as a result of this horrible virus. That's three times as many American lives lost to this virus in a matter of weeks than the entire war in Iraq. Let that sink in for a minute. 

So as they dig mass graves in his hometown (see the first pic above), the president of the United States brags about his television ratings, being number one on facebook, and makes jokes about sex with models on live television when he should be comforting the nation. 

"The Wall Street Journal always “forgets” to mention that the ratings for the White House Press Briefings are “through the roof” (Monday Night Football, Bachelor Finale, according to @nytimes) & is only way for me to escape the Fake News & get my views across. WSJ is Fake News!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 9, 2020"

That is not leadership, it's lunacy.  

*Images from syracuse.com & the grio.com.

More lies.

“The code of the con is to know just enough about everything so you can lie about anything." ~E. Tancarville~ 

I know I shouldn't be watching Donald trump's nightly liefest and propaganda filled news conferences to the nation, but it's like a car wreck on the highway, I find myself unable to turn away. Honestly, they don't need to bring SNL back, because the comic relief this guy gives us night after night is better than anything that they could ever write on one of those shows.

It's sad, too, because the purpose of these press conferences is to give the nation a daily update of what is going on with the deadly coronavirus. But sadly, night after night respected doctors and health professionals have to stand aside and listen to this egomaniacal buffoon tell one glaring lie after another. 

These press conferences have come to take the place of his rallies, because he no longer can meet with large groups of his cult followers to soak up the glow of adoration they pour on him.  And so, at least for now, these press conferences will have to do.

The poor journalists whose job it is to ask questions, are finding out they they are the villains in his sick game. If they dare to ask a legitimate question, he lashes out and calls them fake news. If they attempt to fact-check him, he openly and brazenly lies, because he realizes that he will not be fact-checked in real time. In that room, it's just their word against his, and unfortunately for them, the bully pulpit always wins.

Last night was no exception. trump told lie after lie about his response to the virus, and added yet another scapegoat for his missteps: The World Health Organization. He even threatened to pull funding from the organization. Imagine that, pulling funding from an organization that is responsible for monitoring the state of the world's health when there is a global pandemic raging. 

He kept touting a drug that has not been proven to cure the coronavirus, and like a true conman, he had an example of a woman who had miraculously been cured after taking his magic drug. The lady in question was African American, and he made sure to let us know that. ("She spoke so well. It was unbelievable!" You know, cause black folks are not expected to speak well. Shades of Joe Biden and his Obama articulate gaffe.) The drug in question is now in short supply for people who really need it, and this is a direct result of trump's actions. But hey, in the con game, only the present matters. 

We did learn one thing from this press conference and the medical experts last night, and that is that blacks are being more effected by this virus than all other segments of the population. They said that they are still trying to figure out why, but there is no need for that. I will tell them why: It's because blacks are the ones cleaning in environmental services and working on the front lines in hospitals, as well as other essential service industries. It's because black folks can't afford to take off from work and "social distance". They have to decide if they want to take a chance and die from hunger or the virus.  It's because blacks continue to lag behind the rest of the population when it comes to having proper healthcare and access to proper nutritional foods. It's because regardless of what you might hear, when it comes to healthcare- like so many other aspects of American life- there is no true equality in this country.

trump, of course, had a lie for that as well. "We are going to take care of the African Americans".  

Those words should terrify every African American in this country.

Image from UPI.com

Trying to find trump's soul.

 The following is just the latest in a growing list of articles documenting Mr. trump's mishandling of this coronavirus pandemic. It's from Frank Bruno writing for the New York Times, and it might be the best of the lot. 

.

"Do you remember President George W. Bush’s remarks at Ground Zero in Manhattan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks? I can still hear him speaking of national grief and national pride. This was before all the awful judgment calls and fatal mistakes, and it doesn’t excuse them. But it mattered, because it reassured us that our country’s leader was navigating some of the same emotional currents that we were.

Do you remember President Barack Obama’s news conference after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., that left 28 people, including 20 children, dead? I do. Freshest in my memory is how he fought back tears. He was hurting. He cared. And while we couldn’t bank on new laws to prevent the next massacre, we could at least hold on to that.

One more question: Do you remember the moment when President Trump’s bearing and words made clear that he grasped not only the magnitude of this rapidly metastasizing pandemic but also our terror in the face of it?

It passed me by, maybe because it never happened.

In Trump’s predecessors, for all their imperfections, I could sense the beat of a heart and see the glimmer of a soul. In him I can’t, and that fills me with a sorrow and a rage that I quite frankly don’t know what to do with.

Americans are dying by the thousands, and he gloats about what a huge, rapt television audience he has. They’re confronting financial ruin and not sure how they’ll continue to pay for food and shelter, and he reprimands governors for not treating him with adequate adulation.

He’s not rising to the challenge before him, not even a millimeter. He’s shriveling into nothingness.

On Friday, when Trump relayed a new recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that all Americans wear face masks in public places, he went so far out of his way to stress that the coverings were voluntary and that he himself wouldn’t be going anywhere near one that he might as well have branded them Apparel for Skittish Losers. I’ve finally settled on his epitaph: “Donald J. Trump, too cool for the coronavirus.”

This is more than a failure of empathy, which is how many observers have described his deficiency. It’s more than a failure of decency, which has been my go-to lament. It’s a failure of basic humanity.

In The Washington Post a few days ago, Michael Gerson, a conservative who worked in Bush’s White House, wrote that Trump’s spirit is “a vast, trackless wasteland.” Not exactly trackless. There are gaudy outposts of ego all along the horizon.

When the direness of this global health crisis began to be apparent, I was braced for the falsehoods and misinformation that are Trump’s trademarks. I was girded for the incompetence that defines an administration with such contempt for proper procedure and for true expertise.

But what has taken me by surprise and torn me up inside are the aloofness, arrogance, pettiness, meanness, narcissism and solipsism that persist in Trump — that flourish in him — even during a once-in-a-lifetime emergency that demands something nobler. Under normal circumstances, these traits are galling. Under the current ones, they’re gutting.

“I don’t take responsibility at all.” “Did you know I was number one on Facebook?” To bother with just one of those sentences while a nation trembles is disgusting. To bother with both, as Trump did, is perverse.

He continues to bash the media, as if the virus were cooked up in the bowels of CNN. He continues to play blame games and to lord his station over those of a lesser political caste, turning governors into grovelers and suggesting that they’re whiny piggies at the federal trough.

He continues his one-man orgy of self-congratulation, so that in the same breath recently he speculated about a toll of 100,000 deaths in America from Covid-19 and crowed about what a great job he’s doing.

And he continues to taunt and smear his perceived political adversaries. Last week, on Fox News, he called Nancy Pelosi “a sick puppy.” This is how he chooses to spend his time and energy?

At those beloved daily briefings of his, where he talks and talks and talks, he sometimes seems to regard what’s happening less as a devastating scourge than as a star-studded event. Just look at the nifty degree of prominence it’s conferring on everyone and everything involved! He has mused aloud about how well known Anthony Fauci has become. He has marveled at the disease’s celebrity profile.

“Become a very famous term — C-O-V-I-D,” he said on Thursday. Was that envy in his voice?

He leaps from tone deafness to some realm of complete sensory and moral deprivation.

“I want to come way under the models,” he said on Friday, referring to casualty projections. “The professionals did the models. I was never involved in a model.”

“At least this kind of model,” he added. No context like a pandemic for X-rated humor.

It’s an extraordinary thing: to fill the air with so many words and have none of them carry any genuine sadness or stirring resolve.

I can hear his admirers grumble that he doesn’t do camera-perfect emotions, that Obama was just a better actor, that Trump is the more authentic man.

To which I answer: What’s the point of having a showman for a president if he can’t put on the right kind of show? Performances count, even if they’re just performances. And Trump clearly isn’t averse to artifice. Just look at his hair.

A cheap shot? I’m feeling cheap. A loss of life and livelihoods on this scale will do that to you.

As of this writing, at least 9,600 people with the coronavirus have died in the United States. That’s more than three times the number killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. New York State alone reported 630 new deaths on Saturday. No school shooting has taken even a small fraction of as many lives.

And while I’m not looking to Trump for any panacea, is it too much to ask for some sign that the dying has made an impression on him, that the crying has penetrated his carapace and that he’s thinking about something other than his ratings? I watch. I wait. I suspect I’ll be doing that forever." [Source]

My only problem with Mr. Bruni and others who are now writing these brilliant and thoughtful essays is this: Where have they been all along? Nothing about Mr. trump's modus operandi has changed. He is who he has always been, and we allowed him to get this far.

Caption Saturday.

 

I need a caption for this picture. 

*Image from phuketnews.easybreanches.com

The blame and distraction game.

Imagine being the leader of a country that could possibly have 200,000 of your people die from a pandemic, and in an address to those people you brag about being number one on facebook. 

First, it's a a lie (both former president Obama and soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo have more followers), but it also shows just how much of a narcissist, and ego- driven the individual charged with leading us is. Just watching him up there day after day gives me no confidence that he will be able to handle what we are facing.

We used to be able laugh at trump's buffoonery and his gross incompetence, but given what we are all going through, it's just not funny anymore. Now, more than ever, America needs someone in charge who knows what they are doing. This is trump's first government job, and it shows. The scary thing is that the people around him who might ---and should-- know better are afraid of him, and so they act as sycophants instead of being real advisers.

Sadly, we can't even count on these news conferences to give us information anymore. Yesterday, rather than give us an update on the virus, trump and his political team held a press conference (complete with Bill Barr standing behind him) to tell us what the administration was doing to fight the war on drugs and the Venezuelan President. Yes, that's really what they led with. At this point I am quite sure that must Americans could give a damn about the war on drugs. In fact, quite a few of us are probably saying give us more drugs not less. Lord knows we need something to take us away from this craziness.

Here is the thing, our government is supposed to be protecting us from the scourge drugs, that's kind of their jobs. We need to hear about what's going on with this pandemic that is killing people and making them sick, not the war on drugs. 

But we know why they did it, to create a distraction, because they STILL can't give us any concrete answers about this crisis and how to fight it. It's like Groundhog Day with these people.

Now, predictably, they are blaming everyone else for us being in this predicament but themselves. Yesterday Mike Pence blamed it on the CDC, and Donald trump has blamed the nurses, doctors, the governors, the Chinese, President Obama, and President Bush. 

"The wartime president Harry Truman used to keep a sign on his desk that said: “The buck stops here.” Trump, however, seems eager to wash his hands of the matter, if not actually wash his hands. “Yeah, no, I don’t take responsibility at all, because we were given a set of circumstances and we were given rules, regulations, and specifications from a different time,” he said. “It wasn’t meant for this kind of an event with the kind of numbers that we’re talking about.”'

So much for leadership.


   

  

When the sucker is the American people.

"There's a sucker born every minute" ~ P.T. Barnum~

In keeping with my effort to educate you about trump's handling of this coronavirus, I give you the following article from S.V. Date writing for the Huffington Post.  

"Having sold himself as a great business and military leader despite bankrupt casinos and bone spurs, President Donald Trump faces his greatest challenge yet: making Americans forget the two months he dismissed concerns about a deadly pandemic as a “hoax.”

If recent polling showing a significant bump in his approval ratings is any indicator, though, Trump may well be succeeding ― setting himself on a path to reelection.

No question that the president’s job approval has increased as a result of his handling of the coronavirus crisis,” said GOP pollster Neil Newhouse. “Already about topped out among Republicans, President Trump has made gains among both Independents and Democrats.”
To make this work, Trump has been pushing the biggest lie of his adult life ― a revisionist history in which he did everything correctly, that nobody could have anticipated such an outbreak, and his leadership alone is saving millions of lives.

“It’s hard not to be happy with the job we’re doing. That, I can tell you,” he said last week.

“Nobody could have predicted something like this,” he told Fox News Monday morning.

“I can’t tell you what the unfortunate final toll is going to be, but it’s going to be a very small fraction of that,” he said Tuesday afternoon of expert estimates of 2.2 million dead if the country had done nothing to stop the virus. “So we’re doing an awfully good job, I think, with what we’re doing.”
Each of his claims is false. Trump scrapped the pandemic response team that President Barack Obama created after the 2014 Ebola outbreak, part of an overall effort to undo everything that his predecessor had accomplished. Trump ignored warnings from his own intelligence community that China was covering up the severity of the coronavirus epidemic in the city and province where it originated. Trump even ignored a step-by-step pandemic “playbook” the Obama administration had written.

Instead, Trump discounted the threat the virus posed from Jan. 22, when he told CNBC that “we have it totally under control,” straight through until March 15, when he called it “a very contagious virus” but again claimed it was one “that we have tremendous control over.”

Trump had based his re-election campaign on the strength of the economy, and feared that worries about a pandemic would hurt the stock market. “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” he wrote in a Feb. 24 tweet. “Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

Nevertheless, thanks in part to his ability to command a nationwide audience in press briefings broadcast live each day, Trump has been able push his new message to replace the old one.

“History shows that it takes a personal experience of catastrophe to see that the leader has been telling lies,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an authoritarianism expert and history professor at New York University. “In this case, Trump has artfully ‘dosed out’ reality, telling people everything is fine, then gradually telling them it’s not, with lackey medical professionals to back him up. So he may weather even this crisis.”

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham did not respond to a query about Trump’s new messaging. Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh cited China travel restrictions that Trump imposed at the very end of January as showing he took“decisive action” from the start.
“Throughout this crisis, the president has always sought to keep the public calm, but has listened to his medical and scientific advisors in making firm decisions about keeping the country safe,” Murtaugh said.

Key to turning Trump’s actual performance in those critical early weeks into electoral success likely hinges on two efforts underway.

First is redefining success. Trump early on promised Americans that he had “stopped” the virus from spreading in the U.S. through his ban on foreigners who had recently been in China from entering this country. That morphed into claiming that those few cases here were rapidly shrinking to zero, and that the virus itself would disappear on its own with April’s warmer weather.
Those goalposts have now been moved clear across the planet. From the Feb. 26 boasts of having only 15 cases and zero deaths, Trump this week said success would mean hundreds of thousands of dead Americans.

“If we can hold that down, as we’re saying, to 100,000 — that’s a horrible number — maybe even less, but to 100,000; so we have between 100- and 200,000 — we all, together, have done a very good job,” he said Monday at a press briefing in the White House Rose Garden.

And if Trump’s past is a guide ― he has claimed that running his casinos into bankruptcy starting in the early 1990s somehow represented a business success ― he will keep claiming he handled the crisis well, regardless of how many Americans wind up dying.

“I think he can move the numbers as high as he needs to with his base because he has primed them to accept whatever he tells them and to disbelieve everyone else,” Ben-Ghiat said.
The other piece of Trump’s strategy is relentlessly attacking those who point out his previous statements. Trump has done this repeatedly in his daily briefings, attacking reporters when they read his earlier remarks back to him verbatim.

“Instead of asking a nasty, snarky question like that, you should ask a real question,” he said to a journalist Monday.

His campaign, meanwhile, had set upon the mission of trying to block Trump’s most egregious downplaying of the pandemic: His Feb. 28 description of the coronavirus fears as “a hoax” ― the most recent in a line of Democratic attempts to hurt his presidency.

Campaign officials, realizing the seriousness of Trump’s riff at a rally in South Carolina that evening, soon afterward began attacking journalists who described Trump’s use of “hoax” as misrepresenting what he said.

“Will she apologize for lying?” wrote a Trump campaign staffer on March 23 after Washington Post reporter Ashley Parker accurately described Trump’s use of the word in an NBC News report.
The campaign has even threatened to sue TV stations that were running an ad by the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA that used the audio clip of Trump saying “hoax” in a montage of his statements downplaying the virus.

“We will not stand idly by and allow you to broadcast false, deceptive, and misleading information concerning President’s Trump’s healthcare positions without consequence,” the campaign said in a letter.

Of course, the response to that letter may foreshadow the steep hill Trump faces more broadly in re-writing the history of his coronavirus response. According to Priorities USA, not a single TV station complied with the campaign request to pull the ad, and the super PAC recently released a revised one, using the much higher number of coronavirus cases.

Indeed, while Trump may be enjoying a bump right now in the public support, that newfound popularity could fade as his repeated lies about his performance come up against the reality of the coronavirus’ lethality.

Trump confounded the political class in both parties in 2016, seeming to suffer little consequence for repeated and readily disproven lies about himself, his opponents and the world at large.
Trump falsely claimed he had built “a massive empire,” a “phenomenal company,” starting with just a “very small loan” from his father. He boasted that he knew more about war than “the generals.”
In fact, Trump lost millions of dollars running an airline, vastly overpaid for a midtown hotel he wound up losing and bankrupted his casinos ― a near impossibility, given their business model ― nearly squandering the fortune his father had left him of nearly $1 billion in today’s dollars.

And when the prospect of serving in the Vietnam War presented itself, Trump claimed the ailment of “bone spurs” to avoid the military ― even though he later could not recall which heel had suffered the malady.

Trump countered endless media “fact checks” of his dishonesties by attacking the media instead ― a strategy he openly admitted to in an interview with Lesley Stahl of CBS News in 2016. “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you,” he said.

Yet Trump was able to get away with all those lies, as well as a torrent of fresh lies since becoming president, because they did not directly affect the lives of most Americans, NYU’s Ben-Ghiat said.
That will not be the case with the pandemic. In a span of just 30 days, 3,440 Americans had died by Tuesday afternoon, with 1,000 of those happening in the past two days. Which means that even Trump’s most loyal supporters, who crave his professional wrestling-style attacks on Democrats and the news media regardless of their accuracy, are likely to wind up personally knowing someone who has become gravely ill or died from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

“The ‘Big Lie’ is not applicable in this case,” Ben-Ghiat said, referring to the maxim that people are more prone to believe a massive falsehood than a smaller one, because they do not want to accept that their leaders are capable of telling consequential lies. “For example, saying the virus was a hoax, because people will personally get sick and communities will be devastated.”

She said she believes Trump can continue to hold his base supporters by gradually increasing his assessment of the pain and loss it will cause ― but she and others doubt that his message will fly with anyone beyond that group.

“At some point, reality intrudes on the ‘Big Lie.’ But at this point we don’t know when,” said Norman Ornstein, a scholar with the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute think tank. “One interesting part of this is that the people who bought into the hoax idea, who are still resisting social distancing, are in the red states and in red areas in other states. They may be the ones who will really catch a wave that overwhelms them, especially in rural areas, with the virus a little bit later on.”

If that happens, Trump could quickly lose the “rally around the president” lift he has seen in recent polling. That boost has helped other presidents ― from Jimmy Carter in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 taking of American hostages in Iran, through Obama in 2012 with the landfall of Superstorm Sandy in the northeast. But it can fade away if the president is seen as failing to rise to the challenge.

“Read these polls with a most careful, cautious eye. They reflect the present in a time of crisis,” said Democratic pollster Peter Hart about Trump’s higher numbers, pointing out that Carter wound up losing in his reelection bid in a landslide. “The election is far ahead of us, but the challenges facing Donald Trump are as formidable as those that faced Jimmy Carter in 1980.”

Newhouse, the Republican pollster, agreed that Trump’s improved numbers now do not guarantee anything. “As others have said, we are in the early stages of this fight against coronavirus, and the president’s approval score will continue to reflect his handling of this crisis,” he said. “Unlike the recent impeachment inquiry, this crisis is likely to have a significant impact on the November election.”[Article]


*Image from WBUR

  

The Grifter.

If you watched Mr. trump's daily propaganda "Dear Leader" hour yesterday, you were treated to quite a show.

I think it's safe to say, that given all that's at stake, yesterday's performance was a new low. And when it comes to trump that's saying something. There doesn't seem to be any bottom with this guy.

Mr. trump spent most of his presser bragging about his accomplishments, bashing the governors of two of the states hardest hit by the virus, bashing the free press, bragging about the ratings of the press conferences (which is silly, because most Americans tune in, not because of trump, but to know just what it is their government is doing to stop this pandemic), and making racist and condescending remarks to a black journalist who was just trying to do  her job. It was a sad and pathetic display that was not befitting of the office he holds. But it gets worse. Incredibly, Mr. trump suggested that the healthcare workers, and those involved with hospitals in New York might actually be stealing supplies.

"Donald Trump has accused hospital workers in New York of stealing and possibly selling face masks “out the back door” during an astounding press conference on Sunday evening.

Standing in the White House’s Rose Garden the president asked reporters to look into the supposed illegal activity but provided no evidence to back up his claims aside from increased demand for supplies from hospitals swamped by the coronavirus pandemic.

“For years [suppliers] have been delivering ten to twenty thousand masks. OK, it’s a New York hospital and it’s packed all the time but how do you go from ten to twenty thousand to 300,000?”
“Something’s going on and you ought to look into it as reporters.
Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door? And we. have that in a lot of different places so somebody should probably look into that because I just don’t see from a practical standpoint how that’s possible.”' [Source]

If you are a healthcare worker in New York, going to work everyday, and risking your own life to save the sick dying, that could not have sit well with you to hear those words coming from the president of the United States. And yet he said it.

The president also declared that 2 million people could die, and keeping coronavirus deaths to 100,000 or less would be a "good job".  Remember when he said that there were only 15 or so people with coronavirus  in the United States, and that it would be down to zero, soon? I do.
Now he declares that were it not for his leadership two million people would have died.

This, my friends, in the grifter game is called the switch.  And no one is better at this game than Donald J. trump.


*Pic from Mother Jones. 

Please explain this timeline.