My PC was treated to one of those automatic updates first thing this morning, and I spent the rest of the morning and a chunk of the afternoon trying to make it work again. It’s back to normal now, and I need a nap.

Dr. Rick Bright testified to the House Health subcommittee today. Bright used to be head of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. He says he was demoted because he criticized the administration’s “response” to the pandemic. Among other things he pointed out that the administration has no plan, as I said yesterday. Trump doesn’t do plans.

Here’s another analysis by Mona Charen that’s worth reading — All He Does Is Fight. Charen writes that Republicans decided to support Trump because he was such a dogged fighter. But it turns out that fight is all he does.

Since January, we have witnessed a vivid lesson in the limits of fighting. There were ample reasons before now to recoil from Trump’s style of combat. It is so consistently cruel, witless, below-the-belt, and unhinged (e.g. his recent tweets implying that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough is guilty of murder), that it tainted by association any reasonable arguments that might be advanced for conservative ideas. But in his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve witnessed that even when a dire emergency calls for traits other than bellicosity, fighting is all he knows how to do. This is proving to be a catastrophe for the nation, and also for Trump’s own self-interest.

He honestly doesn’t know how to address a problem to solve it. All he does is react in self-defense.

While the situation cried out for competent coordination and planning, for calm briefings with experts, he looked only for foils. He fought with Democrats, exclaiming on February 28 that “this is their new hoax.” He tangled with insufficiently “grateful” governors who asked for supplies. “I say . . . don’t call the governor of Washington. Don’t call the woman from Michigan.” He disparaged frontline medical professionals, wondering on March 29 whether they were stealing masks (“Are they going out the back door?”). He had a spat with congressional leadership in late February when they proposed an initial coronavirus package more than three times the size of Trump’s request (“Pelosi’s incompetent.” He’s “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer”). He reversed his previous gushing praise and began to blame China for the virus, encouraging the use of nicknames like “Wuhan virus.” He picked a fight with the Postal Service, poured out tweetstorms about his predecessor, whom he accused of dark crimes, and above all, from before dawn till after dark every single day, he battled the press.

In other news — Michigan closed down its capitol building today and canceled a legislative session rather than risk a confrontation with more armed protesters. Seriously, this has got to stop. It’s nothing but terrorism.

At The Atlantic Adam Serwer has a historical retrospective on birtherism that’s fascinating and relevant.

See also Jonathan Last and The Curious Case of the People Who Want to “Reopen” America—But Not Wear Masks. The people opposed to pandemic restrictions harbor a collection of wildly contradictory conspiracy theories.

You might think that these disparate factions would be at war with one another as much as they are against Anthony Fauci. After all, if the coronavirus is a bioweapon that has been unleashed on America by the ChiComs, then some batty old lady claiming that it’s the inevitable consequence of giving kids MMR shots is part of the coverup.

And, conversely, if you’re an anti-vaxxer, then the bioweapon story is also part of a coverup: Anyone who believes it is trying to alibi Big Pharma just as surely as Fauci is.

Yet in vivo, these groups all seem to be holding hands.

Which suggests that not one of these people actually believes what they’re selling.

The one thing they all have in common is that they don’t blame Donald Trump for the mess we’re in. That probably tells you all you need to know.

People are noticing that Trump still doesn’t have a plan. From Caroline Mimbs Nyce, The Atlantic:

It’s been more than 100 days since the first reported case of the coronavirus in the United States, but Donald Trump still doesn’t seem to have a plan. Instead, the president, my colleague David A. Graham points out, is returning to the “breezy language” he employed “in the earliest days of the pandemic” and holding on to “a blithe faith that the disease will simply disappear of its own accord, without a major government response.” …

…He appears to be at a total loss. “His plans have often been derided by skeptics as unwise, unrealistic, or simplistic,” David, who’s covered the president’s responses to an assortment of natural and political crises, notes. “This situation is different, though: Grappling with a multifront crisis, Trump seems to have no plan at all.”

It’s not “seems to have no plan.” Trump just plain doesn’t have a plan. All he does is react to what’s happening, whether it’s to boast or blame or sign some piece of paper that makes it seem he is doing something. But there is no plan. And I question whether he ever has plans. He has ideas, many of them nonsensical; he has intentions; he knows what he wants. He appears to be perpetually scheming. But plans, not so much.

David Graham:

It’s been 111 days since the first reported case of the coronavirus in the United States. It’s been 57 days since President Trump issued social-distancing guidelines, and 12 days since they expired.

Yet the Trump administration still has no plan for dealing with the global pandemic or its fallout. The president has cast doubt on the need for a vaccine or expanded testing. He has no evident plan for contact tracing. He has no treatment ideas beyond the drug remdesivir, since Trump’s marketing campaign for hydroxychloroquine ended in disaster. And, facing the worst economy since the Great Depression, the White House has no plan for that, either, beyond a quixotic hope that consumer demand will snap back as soon as businesses reopen.

Ezra Klein:

It is shocking. More than 60 days after President Trump declared a national emergency over the novel coronavirus, there is still no clear national plan for what comes next. “The lockdown is not meant to be a permanent state of affairs; it’s intended to be a giant pause button that buys you time to get ready for the next phase,” Jeremy Konyndyk, of the Center for Global Development think tank, says.

But the Trump administration wasted the pause. Over the past two months, the US should have built the testing, contact tracing, and quarantine infrastructure necessary to safely end lockdown and transition back to normalcy — as many of our peer countries did. Instead, Trump has substituted showmanship for action, playing the president on TV but refusing to do the actual job. He has both dominated the airwaves and abdicated his duties. As a result, America’s progress against the coronavirus has stalled, even as the lockdown has driven the economy into crisis.

Part of the issue here is that Trump is deeply and profoundly stupid. I doubt that he has a clear understanding of how anything happens. He’s spent most of his life faking his way through situations that were over his head, I suspect, and he got away with the act only because he’s a bully with a lot of money. By now he probably does believe he’s brilliant.

And now he’s in a situation that requires complex planning. Such a thing is way beyond his capabilities, and it appears there is no one left in his circle who can pick up the slack, including his dimwit son-in-law. Even if there were a plan, he wouldn’t understand it and wouldn’t follow through on it. And we know this because he’s ignoring the closest thing he came to a plan, the White House guidelines for reopening the economy. Ezra Klein:

The guidelines are not quite a plan, but they are at least a framework: They call for states to reopen when caseloads have fallen for 14 days, when hospitals can test all health care workers continuously, when contact tracing architecture is up and running.

President Trump, however, shows neither familiarity with, nor support for, his own guidelines. He routinely calls on states to reopen though they have not met the criteria his administration suggests. For instance, his series of tweets calling on right-wing protesters to “LIBERATE!” Michigan, Virginia, and Minnesota from stay-at-home orders contradicted his own administration’s guidance and created a distraction for state officials trying to manage a crisis.

There is an argument out there that not having a plan is the plan. Jay Rosen:

The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible— by telling the governors they’re in charge without doing what only the federal government can do, by fighting with the press when it shows up to be briefed, by fixing blame for the virus on China or some other foreign element, and by “flooding the zone with shit,” Steve Bannon’s phrase for overwhelming the system with disinformation, distraction, and denial, which boosts what economists call “search costs” for reliable intelligence. …

…“The plan is to have no plan” is not a strategy, really. Nor would I call it a policy. It has a kind of logic to it, but this is different from saying it has a design— or a designer. Meaning: I do not want to be too conspiratorial about this. To wing it without a plan is merely the best this government can do, given who heads the table. The manufacture of confusion is just the ruins of Trump’s personality meeting the powers of the presidency. There is no genius there, only a damaged human being playing havoc with our lives.

“The manufacture of confusion is just the ruins of Trump’s personality meeting the powers of the presidency.” Exactly. Sowing bullshit and confusion is all Trump knows how to do, so that’s what is done. And, unfortunately, he is suspicious of what he can’t understand, possibly because if he can’t understand it he might not be able to control it. This is no doubt why the White House blocked publication of a re-opening plan drafted by the CDC. The White House called the CDC plans “overly prescriptive.” Translation: More details than Trump had the patience to try to grasp.

So, there is no plan. And we need a plan.

There is a book that I have read about but not actually read that may provide a clue to why Trump is especially averse to plans. According to reviews and interviews, in The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning,  Northwestern University psychologist Dan P. McAdams proposes that Trump lacks the continual internal narrative that most humans maintain through their lives. This narrative is an ongoing story that connects and contextualizes day to day events and helps us make sense of them. But McAdams thinks Trump doesn’t work that way.

Trump, McAdams argues, can’t form a meaningful life story because he is the “episodic man” who sees life as a series of battles to be won. There is no connection between the moments, no reflection and no potential for growth when one is compulsively in the present.

Donald Trump is a “truly authentic fake,” writes McAdams, professor of human development and social policy at the School of Education and Social Policy. “Trump is always acting, always on stage — but that is who he really is, and that is all he really is. He is not introspective, retrospective or prospective. He does not go deep into his mind; he does not travel back to the past; he does not project far into the future. He is always on the surface, always right now.

“In his own mind, he is more like a persona than a person, more like a primal force or superhero, rather than a fully realized human being,” McAdams adds.

It makes sense that if you relate to life as a series of unconnected episodes, the whole concept of planning would elude you.

In another interview, McAdams said,

He is certainly the “Disrupter in Chief.” He wakes up every morning ready to do battle with his enemies, and he wins by developing tactics that are unprecedented and completely audacious. He did this in the real estate industry in the 1980s, and he does it today. Because he has no story for his life in his own head, Mr. Trump approaches each day as a new episode, with a new battle to win. All that matters is winning the episode. The episodes do not build from one to the next. There is no narrative flow to Donald Trump’s life, at least not in his own head.  This is why he is able to lie with such shameless abandon, and why he is unpredictable from one moment to the next. All tactics, no strategy.

That actually explains a lot, especially the many easily verifiable lies and his incessant flip flops. It’s often said that if you want to change Trump’s mind, be the last person to talk to him. If he has no internal convictions other than in his own greatness, one policy idea is as good as another.

This also explains why he’s such a terrible business man. Most of his businesses have flopped, and if you look closely you see a lot of impulse but probably not much market testing or, well, planning.

So don’t expect him to plan. Planning requires thinking out a number of steps to be carried out over a period of time. Not going to happen.

At this point, he seems to have entirely given up on addressing the pandemic itself and is focused only on mitigating the political fallout. So he’s thrashing around blaming Democrats and anyone in media he thinks isn’t on his side. Oh, and he’s pressuring the CDC to revise down the death counts. Not to do anything about the deaths, mind you; he just wants the number to be smaller. It’s making him look bad.

There’s a lot going on today. I was listening to the Senate hearings with U.S. health authorities. At the same time, the Supreme Court is hearing arguments about whether Donald Trump can ignore a number of subpoenas and keep his tax and other financial records secret. Stay tuned.

Yesterday Paul Waldman wrote a post called Republicans have already decided Trump is going to lose. Republicans seem monumentally uninterested in economic stimulus right now, Waldman says. Why would that be?

Last week Paul Krugman wrote,

But Republicans adamantly oppose extending enhanced unemployment benefits — such an extension, says Senator Lindsey Graham, will take place “over our dead bodies.” (Actually, over other people’s dead bodies.)

They apparently want to return to a situation in which most unemployed workers get no benefits at all, and even those collecting unemployment insurance get only a small fraction of their previous income.

Because most working-age Americans receive health insurance through their employers, job losses will cause a huge rise in the number of uninsured. The only mitigating factor is the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, which will allow many though by no means all of the newly uninsured to find alternative coverage.

But the Trump administration is still trying to have the Affordable Care Act ruled unconstitutional; “We want to terminate health care under Obamacare,” declared Donald Trump, even though the administration has never offered a serious alternative.

Given that we have a crisis unprecedented in most of our lifetimes, and given that the job losses are no one’s fault, one would think that Republicans might just temporarily put aside their zombie ideology and respond to people’s needs. “But no; they’re as determined as ever to punish the poor and unlucky,” Krugman writes.

For example, you still hear complaints that spending on food stamps and unemployment benefits increases the deficit. Now, Republicans never really cared about budget deficits; they demonstrated their hypocrisy by cheerfully passing a huge tax cut in 2017, and saying nothing as deficits surged. But it’s just absurd to complain about the cost of food stamps even as we offer corporations hundreds of billions in loans and loan guarantees.

But what’s even worse, if you ask me, is hearing Republicans complain that food stamps and unemployment benefits reduce the incentive to seek work. There was never serious evidence for this claim, but right now — at a time when workers can’t work, because doing their normal jobs would kill lots of people — I find it hard to understand how anyone can make this argument without gagging.

A lot of those people out of work and struggling are Republican voters. It’s also the case, however, that poor whites receiving benefits have a wonderful capacity to see themselves as deserving of those benefits, while those less white people getting the same benefits are not deserving. Hey, I’m from the Ozarks. I’ve seen it.

Peter Nicholas writes at The Atlantic that Trump’s people recognize that they cannot allow the November election to be a referendum on Trump’s handling of the pandemic. The plan is, then, to persuade people that Joe Biden would do even worse.

Trump is betting that he can stoke enough doubts about Biden’s leadership that his own record looks preferable by comparison. Trump wins if voters view the race as a clear choice between Biden and him, but if “the election becomes a referendum on Trump, it’s a much closer call,” one senior Trump-administration official told me. “This race has to be a contrast,” says John McLaughlin, a Trump pollster.

Well, good luck with that. One of their major talking points is that Joe Biden said something about avoiding air travel during the 2009 swine flu pandemic that was considered stupid at the time. I don’t think that’s going to do the job for them.

And might Republicans be willing to cut Trump loose as he continues to flounder? They’ve been protecting him on the theory that his re-election will help them with congressional elections. But now they are concerned that if Trump goes down he will hurt down-ticket races and give the Senate to Democrats. See Republicans grow nervous about losing the Senate amid worries over Trump’s handling of the pandemic and Nervous Republicans See Trump Sinking, and Taking Senate With Him.

Two of the most evil senators of all time, Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, both facing re-election in the fall.

There is some kind of pathology at work here, but I can’t pin down exactly what kind it is.

Pence — also without a mask — appeared a short time later at the headquarters of the Hy-Vee grocery chain in West Des Moines for a roundtable discussion with the men in front of an audience.

And this, from three days ago:

Two dozen House Republicans gathered with Trump and other administration officials in the State Dining Room at the White House on Friday afternoon to discuss the country’s economic recovery from the pandemic. None of the attendees wore a mask.

“I do want to advise our media friends before they write stories about how we didn’t wear masks and we didn’t possibly socially distance adequately, that you saw to it that we had tests, and that nobody in here had the coronavirus unless it’s somebody in the media,” said Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, during the meeting.

“So the only reason we would wear masks is if we were trying to protect ourselves from you in the media. And we’re not scared of you. So that’s why we can be here like this,” Gohmert continued.

Putting aside the very real possibility of false negatives, this is not the traditional way American leaders have behaved during times of deprivation. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you President Franklin Roosevelt’s ration book:

Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.

I assume FDR didn’t use the coupon book personally, but at Eleanor’s insistence the White House adhered to the same rationing during World War II expected of everyone else. The White House chef served up gourmet items like “noodles and mushrooms with chicken scraps.” Eleanor also planted a victory garden on White House grounds.

Of course, this was the same war that featured Princess Elizabeth engaged in auto mechanics. I can’t imagine Ivanka doing this.

But the Roosevelts were old-school aristocrats with genuine class. Trump has less class than a carnival sideshow. Clearly, in Trump’s World only the little people suffer ill effects from disasters. Lead by example? Are you kidding?

Last Friday we learned that Mike Pence’s press secretary Katie Miller — also the wife of distilled banality of evil Stephen Miller — tested positive. There was a quick flurry of news stories saying the vice president would self-quarantine, quickly followed by another flurry saying he wouldn’t. And he’s not. (However, the Governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, is doing a “modified self-quarantine,” whatever that is, as Mrs. Miller was present at a White House meeting the governor attended recently. Where is her faith?)

Another administration might have insisted on setting an example by quarantining. Not this one. Clearly, the message they are trying to send is that only the little people — not Trumpers — have to put up with inconveniences because of the pandemic.

But let us go back to the testing Louie Gohmert spoke of in the quote above. Everyone around Trump gets tested daily now, we are told, and their contacts are traced to check infection spread. That’s the sort of test-and-track procedure used by all the other countries that are getting the pandemic under control now. But not the U.S., because Trump doesn’t want widespread testing, because the numbers would make him look bad. So he’s letting the quickly rising death toll (officially 81,225 as of this morning) make him look bad, instead. I’ll come back to this.

Greg Sargent writes,

The news that the novel coronavirus has invaded President Trump’s inner circle — and that the White House is implementing aggressive testing and tracing to combat it — is a devastating story on an obvious and immediate level, but also on a deeper and longer-lasting one.

Most palpably, it has revealed the sort of glaring double standard that’s catnip to political media: The White House is taking extensive steps to protect Trump and his top advisers with resources that are largely unavailable to the rest of us, in part due to his own dereliction. …

… The problem isn’t just that this story is revealing that Trump and his advisers benefit from testing and tracing that the rest of us mostly do not enjoy, though that’s damning enough.

It’s also that this shatters the larger illusion Trump is trying to weave with his magical reality-bending powers — that the coronavirus has been so tamed by his stupendous leadership that it’s now safe to reopen the country, setting the stage for an equally spectacular Trump-marshaled comeback.

I don’t think the illusion is shattered just yet, but if someone closer to Trump — one of his offspring, Jared Kushner, Melania, or Pence — came down with covid-19, that would put some cracks in it. I suspect it would take Trump himself becoming seriously ill to really shatter it, though.

Back to the death count. Jonathan Chait wrote last week that Trump has gone into death-denier mode, claiming the official count is inflated.

The next step, reports Axios, will be to begin publicly questioning the listed totals of coronavirus deaths. “Trump has vented that the numbers seem inflated,” it reports, as have several people around him who believe the same.

This is not just a matter of public spin, like Trump’s campaign to pressure the news media into reporting that his tiny inauguration crowd was larger than it was. The news source he trusts, Fox News, has been running hours of programming questioning the death totals. One Fox theory has seized on changes to official tabulation by the CDC. Another misinterprets the categorization of pneumonia deaths. Axios reports that Trump himself has repeated yet another theory, which raises questions about an increase in previously uncategorized nursing-home deaths in New York.

All of these theories are pure crankery. Indeed, the official recorded death count is lower, not higher, than the actual coronavirus death toll. People who die at home from the virus without receiving medical attention have not been included in the official totals. But the fact that Trump and his allies have developed so many different pseudo-statistical objections shows how desperate they are to cast doubt on the official numbers.

The propaganda campaign has worked. The percentage of frequent Fox News watchers who believe that the official coronavirus death counts are exaggerated has risen from 45 percent last month to 61 percent this month.

You might recognize that all this follows yesterday’s post, about how less-educated whites, especially those who live outside of urban areas, still believe the pandemic is mostly a hoax and that there is no sensible reason they can’t all return to life as normal right now. And that follows the post from the day before, on how a disproportionate amount of the pain of the pandemic in America has fallen on nonwhites. Bobbleheads on the teevee keep saying we’re all in this together. We may all be in this, but we’re not together.

Oh, and today Illinois Governor JB Pritzger and his staff are working from home after a colleague tested positive.

More Stuff to Read

Evan Osnos, The New Yorker, The Folly of Trump’s Blame-Beijing Coronavirus Strategy

Gabriel Debenedetti, New York, Biden Is Planning an FDR-Size Presidency

Robert Shapiro, Washington Monthly, The Real Unemployment Rate Is Worse Than Trump Will Tell Us

David Atkins, Washington Monthly, Republicans Want to Sacrifice Your Social Security But Not Their Tax Cuts

David Atkins, Washington Monthly, Trump Was Never on a Glide Path to Re-Election Even Before the Virus

Here’s a curious thing — In the past few weeks, 671,288 Kentuckians filed for unemployment benefits. That’s equal to a third of the workforce in the state. In itself, that’s not surprising. Kentucky is not famous for white collar telecommuter-type jobs. The biggest employers are manufacturers, especially auto makers. After that the state’s economy mostly rests on mining, agriculture, and tourism. These are not economic sectors doing especially well right now. Even horse racing is shut down.

Further, Kentuckians on the whole are not a wealthy lot to begin with. The state ranks 45th in household income among the 56 U.S. states and territories. In 2018, median household income in Kentucky was $48,392, and per capita income was $26,948. So one imagines that a large portion of Kentuckians live from paycheck to paycheck.

Now, here’s the curious part. One would think, in a sane world, that a senator from Kentucky would be working hard right now to get some relief benefits to his constituents. This is especially true if that senator were up for re-election this year. But here in Bizarro World, Kentucky’s Senator Mitch McConnell is leading Republican efforts to quash any further relief packages that might benefit ordinary folks. McConnell wants to wait and see if the first round of $1200 checks have any stimulating effects on the economy before considering another round. But those checks were mostly relief, not stimulus, meant to let people buy food and pay bills. McConnell is also said to be (suddenly) worried about the deficit, even though running it up by cutting taxes on the wealthy was just grand with him.

Oh, and Kentucky’s other senator, the even more worthless Rand Paul who has recovered from covid-19, appears to have voted against nearly all of the stimulus-relief bills that have gone through the Senate this year. He missed some votes while he was ill, or he might have voted against all of them.

How do these bozos get elected? Well, Kentucky is about 88 percent white and is also one of the least educated states, ranking 45th out of 50 states in educational attainment. And less-educated white people are loyal Republican voters.

At WaPo, Jonathan Capehart has a column/podcast up called ‘Dying of whiteness’ during the coronavirus pandemic. Capehart interviews Jonathan Metzl, the director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health and Society, who wrote a book called Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland.

“It was kind of a warning of the lengths to which white working class voters could either have underlying racism or be manipulated to vote in support of wealthy donors and corporations, but against their own lifespans,” Metzl told me in the latest episode of “Cape Up.” “And it’s just been on steroids since this pandemic started.”

At a moment like this, says Metzl, when people are desperate, they fall back on more extremist ideologies. And Trump has been masterful at exploiting their resentments and fears.

Some non-urban whites also might feel invicible to the coronavirus, because the teevee news shows us deaths in big cities and also deaths among black and brown people, as I wrote in the last post. So they aren’t afraid of the virus and believe they are being forced to suffer economic deprivation because it’s hurting those other people, and they resent it. The government is forcing them to wear masks and shelter in place and go without a paycheck for something that isn’t their problem, as they see it.

Protesters near Kentucky state capitol last month.

Kentucky is about average in per capita infections and deaths, and so far the virus spread has been mostly in the urban areas. Rural Kentucky has been barely touched. And, maybe rural Kentuckians will be spared, in part because of the mitigation policies they resent. We’ll see. But we can’t necessarily count on a big poor white backlash against Mitch McConnell’s stinginess.

The one bright spot in this mess is Democrat Andy Beshear’s win over incumbent Matt Bevin in last year’s gubernatorial election. Yeah, that was just last November. Seems like years. Bevin campaigned by wrapping himself in Trump, so to speak. But as I wrote last year, Beshear won not only in the cities and suburbs; he also won some rural counties. And that was mostly because Beshear promised to let people stay on the state’s expanded Medicaid program, while Bevin had vowed to pull the plug on Medicaid. So, rural Kentuckians don’t always vote against themselves.

Oh, and chip in to help Amy McGrath build the grassroots team that can defeat Mitch McConnell.

A billboard in Kentucky

The Atlantic/Lawfare writing team of Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes coined the phrase “malevolence tempered by incompetence” in January 2017 to describe the beginnings of the Trump administration. Malevolence in the form of racism, xenophobia, and greed formed the basis of Trump’s policies, but fortunately the incompetence of his White House team blunted much of the damage that could have been done.

What might loosely be called Trump’s “response” to the pandemic is likely shot through with the same malevolence. But the incompetence is exacerbating the the malevolence.

The incompetence is vast, and deep, and nearly inexplicable. Every day brings new evidence. For example, the Washington Post just reported that in the early days of the pandemic the administration turned down an offer from an American medical supplies  company to manufacture N95 masks. And this was a company already manufacturing N95 masks, filling order from overseas.

“We are the last major domestic mask company,” he [the business owner] wrote on Jan. 23. “My phones are ringing now, so I don’t ‘need’ government business. I’m just letting you know that I can help you preserve our infrastructure if things ever get really bad. I’m a patriot first, businessman second.”

In the end, the government did not take Bowen up on his offer. Even today, production lines that could be making more than 7 million masks a month sit dormant.

Trump himself ignored the virus even after a Washington state man was diagnosed with covid-19 on January 20.  After, apparently, some nagging from public health professionals, Trump imposed partial and porous restrictions on travel from China on January 31. These were particularly Trumpian restrictions that allowed U.S. citizens to re-enter the country from China. Only non-U.S. citizens who had recently been in China were blocked from entering the country, as if only foreigners carried infection. Notice that the guy diagnosed in Washington eleven days earlier was a citizen recently returned from China.

And then Trump and his administration did pretty much nothing about the pandemic until it began to mess with the stock market on February 21. That was a Friday; the following Monday, noises about appropriating money to do something about pandemic response began to emanate from the White House. This was followed by a lot of haggling in Washington about what exactly they should be doing and how much money they would have to spend to do it.

The issue of testing came up a lot. On March 4, Mike Pence promised that 1.5 million test kits would be shipped to whoever needed them “this week.” By March 6, he had upped the promise to 4 million. These tests failed to materialize anywhere, as far as I can tell. Private labs picked up the pace somewhat, but as you know we still are falling far short of tests.

On March 3 the White House issued the first of its social distancing guidelines. By mid-March professional and college sports were cancelling the remainder of their seasons, or postponing the beginning of seasons. Cities and states closed schools and churches and turned restaurants into carryout-only operations. Finally, we were getting serious, many weeks later than we should have gotten serious.

And now, as the deaths keep coming faster and faster — we’ll be at 80,000 by tomorrow — Trump is apparently bored with the whole thing and wants to end the restrictions. This is partly, I think, coming from his justifiable fear that the ruined economy will kill his re-election chances. He also possibly resents the virus for making him look stupid, especially after the train wreck ending of The Trump Show, so he wants to go back to ignoring it.

But another reason is coming vividly into view, especially after many reports that black and brown Americans are being disproportionately hit hard by the pandemic.

Adam Serwer:

Over the weeks that followed the declaration of an emergency, the pandemic worsened and the death toll mounted. Yet by mid-April, conservative broadcasters were decrying the restrictions, small bands of armed protesters were descending on state capitols, and the president was pressing to lift the constraints.

In the interim, data about the demographics of COVID-19 victims began to trickle out. On April 7, major outlets began reporting that preliminary data showed that black and Latino Americans were being disproportionately felled by the coronavirus. That afternoon, Rush Limbaugh complained, “If you dare criticize the mobilization to deal with this, you’re going to be immediately tagged as a racist.” That night, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced, “It hasn’t been the disaster that we feared.” His colleague Brit Hume mused that “the disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought.” The nationwide death toll that day was just 13,000 people; it now stands above 70,000, a mere month later.

But if you’re white and/or have a white-collar sort of job that allows you to work at home or in a reasonably secluded studio, there’s a better chance the virus hasn’t touched you or anyone you know, than if you are non-white and/or at work processing meat or checking out groceries. There are exceptions, of course.

The pandemic is starting to remind me of the early days of the spread of HIV, when Reagan administration officials dismissed it as a “gay plague.” Research into AIDS was conducted at a snail’s pace. According to ACT UP, Reagan himself didn’t say the word “AIDS” publicly until 1987, and that was in the context of denying the need for sex education in schools.

In other words, as long as the disease is only speading among those other people, we don’t need to bother ourselves about it.

Back to Serwer:

That more and more Americans were dying was less important than who was dying.

The disease is now “infecting people who cannot afford to miss work or telecommute—grocery store employees, delivery drivers and construction workers,” The Washington Post reported. Air travel has largely shut down, and many of the new clusters are in nursing homes, jails and prisons, and factories tied to essential industries. Containing the outbreak was no longer a question of social responsibility, but of personal responsibility. From the White House podium, Surgeon General Jerome Adams told “communities of color” that “we need you to step up and help stop the spread.”

Public-health restrictions designed to contain the outbreak were deemed absurd. They seemed, in Carlson’s words, “mindless and authoritarian,” a “weird kind of arbitrary fascism.” To restrict the freedom of white Americans, just because nonwhite Americans are dying, is an egregious violation of the racial contract. The wealthy luminaries of conservative media have sought to couch their opposition to restrictions as advocacy on behalf of workers, but polling shows that those most vulnerable to both the disease and economic catastrophe want the outbreak contained before they return to work.

The business with meat-packing workers is especially egregious. These are low-wage jobs with notoriously bad working conditions. In many plants immigrants make up a large part of the workforce. And in many states meat-packing plants have turned into coronavirus hot spots. No one seems to be keeping a count of how many have died. Trump’s ordering meat-packers back to work without mandating better and safer working conditions is one of the most callous things a president has done in my lifetime.

It’s not just Trump. Last week the Wisconsin Supreme Court heard a challenge to the state’s pandemic restrictions. Chief Justice Patience Roggensack interrupted oral arguments about infections in Brown County and said, “Due to the meatpacking, though, that’s where the Brown County got the flare. It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown County.” I guess if the virus spread is emanating from the meat packing plant it doesn’t count.

It gets worse. This past week the governor of Nebraska issued a “gag order” that prohibits release of information on the infection in Nebraska meat packing plants.

Trump probably figures the immigrant and nonwhite workers he’s putting at risk aren’t going to vote for him, anyway. But rural poor whites are a big part of his voter base, also, and these “regular folks” work in risky jobs. Polls tell us that college-educated whites — more of whom can work from home — tend to prefer Biden by about a 15 percentage point margin. Trump needs to take care he doesn’t kill part of his own base.

In this April 2020, photo provided by Tyson Foods, workers wear protective masks and stand between plastic dividers at the company’s Camilla, Georgia poultry processing plant. Tyson has added the plastic dividers to create separation between workers because of the coronavirus outbreak. (Tyson Foods via AP)In this April 2020, photo provided by Tyson Foods, workers wear protective masks and stand between plastic dividers at the company’s Camilla, Georgia poultry processing plant. Tyson has added the plastic dividers to create separation between workers because of the coronavirus outbreak. (Tyson Foods via AP)
The Associated Press https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/stopping-virus-huge-challenge-crowded-us-meat-plants-70300170

The good times rolled. And rocked.

As I understand it, it is possible the judge in the Michael Flynn case could choose to not drop it.

The Department of Justice on Thursday told U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington it wants to drop the case against Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, following a pressure campaign by the Republican president and his political allies.

While judges typically sign off on such motions, Sullivan could refuse and instead demand answers from the DOJ about who requested the sudden about-face, said Seth Waxman, a former federal prosecutor now at the law firm Dickinson Wright.

“If Judge Sullivan wanted to he could conduct an inquiry and start asking a lot of questions,” said Waxman. …

… While the judge still has to rule on the submission, elated supporters of Flynn said there was no way Sullivan could force the department to prosecute if it did not want to. But the judge could stop Flynn from withdrawing his guilty plea and impose sentence. In that case, Trump could pardon Flynn.

It would be better to force Trump to pardon Flynn than to sign off on dropping the case, IMO. Absurdly, the Trump campaign sees Flynn as their Nelson Mandela, a hero persecuted by the evil deep state. I’m not seeing anyone who is not already a Trump cultie being impressed with that, though.

See also Reuters:

The notoriously independent-minded federal judge who once said he was disgusted by the conduct of Michael Flynn could block the administration’s bid to drop criminal charges against the former adviser to President Donald Trump, legal experts said.

The Department of Justice on Thursday told U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington it wants to drop the case against Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, following a pressure campaign by the Republican president and his political allies.

While judges typically sign off on such motions, Sullivan could refuse and instead demand answers from the DOJ about who requested the sudden about-face, said Seth Waxman, a former federal prosecutor now at the law firm Dickinson Wright.

Marcy Wheeler dissects the DOJ’s arguments for dropping the Flynn case here. I am not going to attempt to sum this up except to say that she makes a good case that the judge is more likely to be annoyed than impressed with the DOJ.

“If Judge Sullivan wanted to he could conduct an inquiry and start asking a lot of questions,” said Waxman.

Stay tuned.

See also:

David Frum, The Secrets Flynn Was Desperate to Conceal

Susan Hennessey, Quinta Jurecic, Benjamin Wittes, An Ugly Day for the Justice Department

Paul Waldman, Barr’s corrupt decision points to Trump’s moral rot of our institutions.

See also Trump cryptically tells reporters ‘a lot of things’ might happen soon following call with Putin.

President Trump is celebrating throwback Thursday with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump told reporters on Thursday that he spoke on the phone with Putin and the two discussed the investigation into Russian election interference. That investigation determined that Russia had meddled to aid Trump in 2016, did not find prosecutable proof of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and did not determine whether administration officials sought to obstruct the probe.

Reiterating his displeasure with the investigation, Trump said the “Russia hoax” was “very hard” on the U.S. and Russia’s foreign relations. “And we discussed that,” said Trump of his call with Putin, also noting he offered to send Russia ventilators to aid COVID-19 patients.

Would those be some of the ventilators confiscated from hospitals and states, I wonder?

Yeah, our utterly corrupt Justice Department just dropped the Michael Flynn case.

The Justice Department moved Thursday to drop charges against former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts during the presidential transition.

The unraveling of Flynn’s guilty plea marked a stunning reversal by the Justice Department in the case of the former three-star Army general, who was convicted in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

In court documents filed Thursday, the Justice Department said “after a considered review of all the facts and circumstances of this case, including newly discovered and disclosed information… the government has concluded that [Flynn’s interview by the FBI] was untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn” and that the interview on January 24, 2017 was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”

I guess we should have seen this coming. Lying scumbag and faux attorney general William Barr has been making noises about how the entire investigation into Russian interference of the 2016 election was just a witch hunt perpetrated by “deep state” operatives opposed to Donald Trump. Well, he didn’t say that exactly, but he was hinting at it loudly.

Barr has been investigating the Russian investigation for nearly a year now, at Donald Trump’s request. This is from May 24, 2019:

President Trump has handed Attorney General William Barr the keys to the vault.

Trump has authorized Barr to “declassify, downgrade, or direct the declassification or downgrading of information or intelligence” related to the origins of the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, according to an official order.

The White House says that will mean he can be freer to reveal wrongdoing if he finds it. Democrats call it a bid to scare up political “weapons.”

The memo signaled how much Trump wants Barr to not only go ahead with the efforts he has discussed to review the early period of the inquiry — and officials’ use of the law and their investigative powers — but to also get what Barr uncovers out into the open quickly.

The argument has been that the entire Russian interference investigation was not lawful because whatever warrants or authorities being used to conduct it were obtained under false pretenses. The Steele dossier gets dragged into this part of the claim a lot.

Apparently Barr wasn’t finding anything resembling a smoking gun. Then a few days ago some new FBI documents breathed some life into the conspiracy theories. Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes wrote at Lawfare a week ago:

Why the sudden interest in the Golden Oldies of the Trump scandals? The reason is the release of some documents from inside the FBI dealing with Flynn’s original interview by agents from the bureau, back from the period when the Trump administration was just coming into power. Flynn’s sentencing on his guilty plea for lying in that interview has been serially delayed. According to some commentators, the documents supposedly show that he was somehow set up, framed or entrapped. A lot of people seem to be expecting his sudden vindication. And a lot more people, some of whom should know better, seem remarkably credulous of Flynn’s new claims.

They should take a deep breath.

The president may well pardon Flynn, as he has long hinted. It’s possible—though for reasons we’ll explain, we think unlikely—that Judge Emmet G. Sullivan will allow Flynn to withdraw his plea. And it’s possible as well that Attorney General William Barr, who has already intervened in the case once before and has asked a U.S. attorney to review its handling, will intervene once again on Flynn’s behalf.

So far, however, nothing has emerged that remotely clears Flynn; nothing has emerged that would require Sullivan to allow him to withdraw his plea; and nothing has emerged that would justify the Justice Department’s backing off of the case—or prosecuting it aggressively if Flynn were somehow allowed out of the very generous deal Special Counsel Robert Mueller cut him.

Jurecic and Wittes go into detail about things going on with Flynn and FBI documents and whatnot that I’m still digesting myself.  Lots of names that will be familiar from the days of the Mueller Report come up. Although there’s not much to the newly released documents, my guess is that Barr is dropping the case to give the appearance that this is some significant new evidence showing that the entire Russian interference story was a hoax.

See also Trump says new FBI notes exonerate Michael Flynn, analysts say that’s not the case.

I’m sure there will be more commentary on this as the day goes on.

Although the original Trump Show is gone, there will soon be a spinoff — The Grand Re-Opening Starring Trump. Paul Waldman explains,

Again, that was before we knew there would be a pandemic. Now, we’re all in unknown territory. I doubt anyone can predict exactly what the economy will do the remainder of the year.

… investors could be in for another shock as Covid-19 continues to kill Americans and devastate the private sector. A parade of companies, including some of the nation’s largest profit machines, are reporting lower profits or warning that earnings could struggle in the coming months as consumers stay cautious and businesses assume the crash position. Many other CEOs are simply throwing up their hands and offering a giant shrug.

“Companies have no idea what is going to happen whatsoever,” said Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research Inc. “I’m an optimist. I had a happy childhood. But you have to be a realist here that there are going to be aftershocks and no V-shaped recovery. Plenty of companies — especially retail, hotels, restaurants and airlines — would be happy to get 50 percent of their peak business back a year from now.”

Maybe it won’t be that bad. Maybe it’ll be worse. Predictions are all over the map. Personally, I predict that small businesses will continue to be screwed, and huge numbers of them simply will not come back. That prediction is based partly on what’s going on in the Senate right now:

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the chairman of the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, blocked an attempt by Democrats to pass a bill that would require the Trump administration to report new details on how small-business aid is being dispersed amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Translation: Money allocated for small business will mostly end up in the pockets of people who have little connection to small business. Bye bye, small business.

Although Republican voters on the whole may still think Trump walks on water, a majority of them are not behind a big re-opening of the economy just yet. And a whopping majority of the rest of us think Trump is pushing the economy to re-open too fast.

A poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland released yesterday finds that eight in 10 Americans oppose reopening movie theaters and gyms; three-quarters don’t support letting sit-down restaurants and nail salons reopen; and a third or less would allow barber shops, gun stores, and retail stores to operate. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll last week found similar numbers: Nine in 10 Americans don’t think sporting events should have crowds without more testing; 85 percent would keep schools closed, and 80 percent would keep dine-in restaurants shut. There is no significant difference in views between residents of states that have begun loosening restrictions and those that have not.

Here in Missouri, the utterly worthless Gov. Mike Parsons has decided live music concerts can resume, as of two days ago, stipulating that concert-goers must be spaced six feet apart. I’ve been looking for evidence that anybody is holding a live music concert anytime soon. No announcements so far. The biggest cities — St. Louis, Kansas City, and Springfield — are keeping venues closed. Some live entertainment venues will begin opening in tourist town Branson on May 15.  We’ll see how that works out.

The Kansas City Star: 

Inexplicably, the governor’s “Show Me Strong” economic recovery plan included a woefully premature green light for socially distanced concerts. What, exactly, a distanced concert looks like is still unclear and why anyone would attend a live event during a pandemic remains an unanswered question.

Fortunately, most concert organizers and venue operators so far are exercising better judgment than the governor.

With so many people out of work, or worried they soon could be out of work, I’m betting that people will hang on to their money for a while and spend it only on essentials. But again, we’ll see. There may be enough people willing to risk their lives to go mall shopping or attend the Branson Elvis Festival to make the re-opening profitable. Not me, but other people. I just plan on surviving until November, so I can vote.