As expected, some time in the early morning today someone became the 70,000th American to die of covid 19, officially. The real number of deaths is considerably higher, experts tell us, possibly by tens of thousands.

And, of course, those aren’t just numbers. Those are people. They are mourned. They mattered.

The virus is spreading rapidly into less populated areas. From Axios, yesterday:

The big picture: The hardest-hit areas so far have mostly been in states with Democratic governors. But the number of coronavirus cases is now increasing more quickly in states with Republican governors.

By the numbers: Coronavirus cases and deaths are both higher in Democratic states than in Republican ones, even after adjusting for population.

However, over the last two weeks, reported infections have increased 91% in red states versus 63% in blue states.

We see the same pattern for COVID-19 deaths: 170% growth in red states vs. 104% in blue states.

Reproduced from Kaiser Family Foundation; Data from The Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins, U.S. Census Bureau; Chart: Axios Visuals

It’s a safe bet no one has had the nerve to tell Trump that the pandemic is poised to infect large numbers of his own voters. He still seems to be thinking that the pandemic is confined to blue states.

President Donald Trump says it would be unfair to Republicans if Congress passes coronavirus “bailouts” for states because he said the states that would benefit from that funding are run by Democrats.

It’s not like there are Americans living in those states or anything.

“I think Congress is inclined to do a lot of things but I don’t think they’re inclined to do bailouts. A bailout is different than, you know, reimbursing for the plague,” Trump told the New York Post in a sit-down interview in the Oval Office on Monday.

The president continued, “It’s not fair to the Republicans because all the states that need help — they’re run by Democrats in every case. Florida is doing phenomenal, Texas is doing phenomenal, the Midwest is, you know, fantastic — very little debt.”

States in general are not exactly rolling in money, and nearly all of them have some kind of balanced budget requirement. That means that as state and local funds are diverted to pandemic response there will be less money for things like police, firefighters, teachers, sanitation workers. Any state — red, blue, or purple — that gets slammed by the pandemic is going to need help from the federal government. And since the red states tend to be poorer, in effect many of them have been getting federal “bailout” money for years. Courtesy of blue state taxpayers.

Trump is going all-out to persuade us all to give up on the social distancing and go back to work. He is clearly willing to trade lives for the economy. My sense of things is that a lot of Americans have been lulled into believing the worst is over. But it’s possible we haven’t seen the worst yet. Trump is betting all of our futures on what a virus might do.

Jay Rosen warns us of what’s coming:

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. 

Stated another way, the plan is to default on public problem solving, and then prevent the public from understanding the consequences of that default. To succeed this will require one of the biggest propaganda and freedom of information fights in U.S. history, the execution of which will, I think, consume the president’s re-election campaign. So much has already been made public that the standard script for a White House cover up (worse than the crime…) won’t apply. Instead, everything will ride on the manufacture of confusion. The press won’t be able to “expose” the plot because it will all happen in stark daylight. The facts will be known, and simultaneously they will be inconceivable.

Will Trump get away with this? Among some Americans, certainly. But what percentage? I’d like to think it won’t be a high enough percentage to save him, especially as the virus spreads and touches more and more families.

Paul Waldman writes that Trump is massively miscalculating what most Americans think right now.

It’s been fifty years since the Kent State shootings.

The angry mobs brandishing firearms who oppose pandemic restrictions are another massacre waiting to happen, IMO. Yes, many states are ending restrictions now. But for how long? The deaths are not going away.

The projections, based on government modeling pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.

Today there are reports that a security guard in a Family Dollar store in Flint, Michigan, was shot in the head and killed by an angry customer. The customer, according to social media, was confronted by the guard because he wasn’t wearing a mask. Police are investigating.

Also, too:

A Colorado man arrested after federal agents allegedly discovered pipe bombs in his home had also been helping organize an armed protest demanding the state lift its coronavirus restrictions, an official briefed on the case tells ABC News.

It’s going to be a nasty summer, folks. Long and hot.

I’ve been watching the estimated death toll kind of obsessively. It keeps going up faster than anyone, including me, calculates. Remember last week when I wrote about a guy in the Washington Times predicting that we’d reach 70,000 dead by the end of August? We’ll pass 70,000 later today or early tomorrow.

Aaron Rupar writes at Vox:

President Donald Trump’s “America Together: Returning to Work” Fox News town hall event was a remarkably dishonest affair, replete with lies about topics ranging from the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine on Covid-19 to the trajectory of new coronavirus cases in the country to how tariffs work. At one point, Trump whined that he’s treated worse than Abraham Lincoln — a president who was assassinated.

But one moment of unusual honesty stood out.

With the US coronavirus death toll approaching 70,000 as of May 4 — a grim milestone significantly beyond the “50 or 60,000” number that Trump said the country was “going toward” on April 20 — Trump revised his estimate upward. And he acknowledged he was doing so.

“I used to say 65,000. Now I’m saying 80 or 90, and it goes up and it goes up rapidly. But it’s still going to be, no matter how you look at it, at the very lower end of the plane if we did the shutdown,” Trump said, alluding to the 100,000-to-200,000 death estimate cited in late March by public health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Especially with so many states loosening restrictions, we could reach 200,000 or more deaths before Labor Day. At 3,000 a day, make that before July 4. We’ll likely be halfway there some time this month. By August Trump will be congratulating himself it’s not 500,000 dead.

The epidemiologists say the virus is going to be with us for a long time. One new report says it will be around for a couple of years and won’t be halted until there is at least 70 percent herd immunity. People who assume it’s almost over — which could be a majority of Americans, for all I know — are going to be very disappointed.

When we do get through this, we will be in a very different place from where we were in January 2020. A great many small businesses are not going to survive, thanks in large part to the inability of our government to do anything but feed the corruption monster. Annie Lowrey writes at The Atlantic,

The government is engaged in an unprecedented effort to save such companies as pandemic-related shutdowns stretch into the spring. But Washington’s policies are too complicated, too small, and too slow for many firms: Across the United States, millions of small businesses are struggling, and millions are failing. The great small-business die-off is here, and it will change the landscape of American commerce, auguring slower growth and less innovation in the future.

Small businesses went into this recession more fragile than their larger cousins: Before the crisis hit, half of them had less than two weeks’ worth of cash on hand, making it impossible to cover rent, insurance, utilities, and payroll through any kind of sustained downturn. And the coronavirus downturn has indeed been shocking and sustained: Data from credit-card processors suggest that roughly 30 percent of small businesses have shut down during the pandemic. Transaction volumes, a decent-enough proxy for sales, show even bigger dips: Travel agencies are down 98 percent, photography studios 88 percent, day-care centers 75 percent, and advertising agencies 60 percent.

Lowrey goes on to explain all the ways the stimulus/relief programs have failed to do what they were intended to do, which was to keep small business on life support until it was safe to open up again. I’m not going to repeat all that here; you know much of it already, I’m sure. Washington is a machine fine-tuned to funnel money to the monied, and when it came time to send money to people who really needed it to survive, it did what it did best — send it to those with connections.

Indeed, loans of $1 million or more soaked up half of the initial $350 billion allocated by Congress. Whiter, less populated states got more loan money per capita, with Vermont, North Dakota, and Minnesota overrepresented and Nevada, Florida, and California underrepresented. Researchers found no evidence that money went to the places and industries hit hardest, as measured by business closures and declines in hours worked. The accommodation- and food-services sector accounted for two in three jobs lost, but received just 9 percent of federal aid dollars.

When this is over we’re going to need a New Deal to get the economy going again.

We’re already a much-diminished nation. The world is learning it doesn’t need us. For example, see The world came together for a virtual vaccine summit. The U.S. was conspicuously absent in WaPo.

World leaders came together in a virtual summit Monday to pledge billions of dollars to quickly develop vaccines and drugs to fight the coronavirus. …

…The conference, led by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a half-dozen countries, was set to raise $8.2 billion from governments, philanthropies and the private sector to fund research and mass-produce drugs, vaccines and testing kits to combat the virus that has killed nearly 250,000 people worldwide.

The U.S. could not provide a reason why it did not participate. It just didn’t. Russia and India also were absent.

IMO the future balance of power will be between the EU and China. Indeed, if the 20th was the American Century, the 21st may end up being the Chinese Century. See Anne Applebaum, The Rest of the World Is Laughing at Trump. “Whoever replaces Pompeo will have only four short years to repair the damage, and that might not be enough,” she writes. And if Trump wins another term, the world will know we are no longer a serious nation.

So we’re screwed. But we’ve got the next few months to get through. Stay home as much as you can. Wash your hands. Don’t touch your face. Wear a mask. Outlive the bastards.

This is a follow up to my April 4 post, Are the Trumps Engaged in Profiteering? You might remember this bit:

On March 27 Politico reported that a prominent DC-based Republican fundraiser had just notified his clients that he would not be working to raise funds for them after April 1. And why not? Because he’s going into the medical supplies business.

The fundraiser, Mike Gula, formed a company called Blue Flame Medical LLC, and he promoted himself as the guy to go to for all your pandemic needs.

“I don’t want to overstate, but we probably represent the largest global supply chain for Covid-19 supplies right now,” he said. “We are getting ready to fill 100 million-unit mask orders.”

Gula had no background in the medical supplies field, nor did he explain exactly what his connections were. He just said he had a lot of connections and had partnered with a lot of firms, but didn’t say anything specific.

Now Blue Flame is in the news again.

Maryland is asking its attorney general to investigate a new company formed to buy and distribute protective gear after a $12.5 million shipment of face masks and ventilators for use in the novel coronavirus pandemic never arrived, the Wall Street Journal reports. …

… Details: Maryland state officials ordered the medical supplies from Blue Flame Medical LLC, which was founded by Mike Gula, a former fundraiser for the Republican Party, WSJ reports.

Maryland officials said they waited over 30 days for the medical supplies.

Gula told Maryland officials in a letter that the state’s order had been seized by officials in China, and said he plans to deliver the materials soon after switching to a new supplier.

Maryland has more than 24,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus.

How can an ambitious guy make a quick buck in these conditions, I ask you? At least it was Chinese officials and not FEMA that seized the shipment this time. Maryland says it has waited a month for the shipment and won’t wait any longer. And, anyway, Maryland has its own connections in South Korea, thank you.

Here’s another measure of What We’re Up Against — you may have heard there are very preliminary but still promising indications that the drug remdesivir may have some effectiveness in treating covid-19. It’s not a cure by any means, but it might help.

Weirdly, however, the MAGA-heads are shunning remdesivir and remaining loyal to the now discredited hydroxychloroquine. And they’re going this even though Trump promoted remdesivir in an Oval Office event and saw to it the FDA gave it a go-ahead to be used to treat covid-19.

Tina Nguyen reports in Politico that the people who promoted hydroxychloroquine — Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, for example — as a miracle cure are talking down remdesivir as too dangerous and too expensive. And why would this be?

The unexpected reaction appears to stem from the differences in how the two drugs came into the public spotlight. Hydroxychloroquine bubbled up through the MAGA grassroots — little-known investors promoted it online, got on Fox News and suddenly the president was talking about it from the White House. Remdesivir’s progress came through a government-funded trial that had the blessing of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the bête noire of Trump hardliners who blame the government’s top infectious disease expert for undermining the president and causing unnecessary economic damage with his social-distancing guidelines.

It’s also the case that remdesivir is still under patent to the ironically named Gilead Sciences, Inc., which makes it a Big Pharma product, whereas hydroxychloroquine is available in generic form. Apparently that makes hydroxychloroquine better, even if it doesn’t work.

These factors were likely enough to turn off people who had been using hydroxychloroquine as a political rallying cry, said David Rapp, a psychology professor at Northwestern University who studies how misinformation shapes beliefs and memory.

The hydroxychloroquine boosters, he said, “might find the alternative idea as not being pure, in the sense that it doesn’t come from Trump. It’s coming from other sources that they might not trust.”

In other words, there is absolutely nothing that escapes the tribal loyalty filter. Hydroxychloroquine has been accepted as the approved drug of the tribe; remdesivir is being pushed by outsiders and is therefore unacceptable.

Dana Milbank pointed out today that the gun-toting protesters swaming state capitol buildings appear to have no agenda other than being really, really angry. About something.

At the American Patriot Rally at the state Capitol in Lansing, Mich., on Thursday, many of the hundreds of protesters wore red “Make America Great Again” caps or flew “Trump 2020” banners and “Build the Wall” or “Drain the Swamp” signs. Others waved the yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags of the tea party. Demonstrators, several armed with military-style guns, then marched into the statehouse and stared down the police.

What did they propose to do with these weapons? Shoot the virus? Shoot the governor? Shoot themselves in the foot?

They didn’t seem to have a plan. They were there to rail against Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s pandemic restrictions, though hers are not so different from those in other states, even those run by Republican governors. They howled about “tyranny” even though the country is now run by the man they helped elect. They fretted about losing their Second Amendment rights even as they carried guns, legally under Michigan law, into the Capitol. They complained about runaway government spending and money-printing even though Trump and the GOP have championed it.

I think we can say this is not a deeply informed crew. But in the past I have observed that righties tend to process information as allegories and symbols of things they value, or not, rather than deal with facts. They are living inside a complex myth in which they are noble and virtuous somethings — warriors? patriots? — perpetually beset by dark and satanic forces striving to deprive them of their Freedom. Freedom in this sense is a word weighted with murky symbolism that doesn’t seem to have much to do with individualism — our righties do think and act as one, like a dystopian Borg Collective –civil liberty, national security, or the rule of law. But whatever it is, it’s really, really important.

Likewise, the drugs hydroxychloroquine and remdesivir represent something to righties that is disconnected from science or medicine. It may be a little difficult to put one’s finger on exactly what that something is, and righties probably would be challenged to explain it themselves. But in the myth that forms their worldview, one drug is righteous and the other is not.

The one thing we can say about the pandemic protesters is that they’ve got grievances up the wazoo. We can question whether their grievances are justified, of course. A great many people have pointed out that in the U.S., only white men get to display firearms in a threatening manner with impunity. A mob of men carrying firearms — many of them semi-automatic rifles — into a legislative building like that wouldn’t be tolerated anywhere else in the world, I believe. Yet these guys think they suffer from a lack of freedom, or something. They are aggrieved, for sure.

This reminds me of one of my favorite Eric Hoffer quotes, from The True Believer:

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.

The “holy cause” in this case appears to be some 1950s-era Disneyfied vision of “patriotism” mingled — in some cases — with Christian dominionism. And of course there’s a lot of white nationalism mixed in there also. It’s less religion than a twisted idea of religion, just as their “patriotism” is a bizarro world idea of patriotism that has little resemblance to the real thing. Note, for example, the frequent use of Confederate and Nazi symbols by right-wing extremist groups in the U.S. However, it has to be said that some Michigan protesters accused Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of being a Nazi. Some parts of their mythology may need some work.

And there also must be villains. Dr. Anthony Fauci is a villain to the pandemic protesters, as is Bill Gates and a few other random people.

This guy in the photo below seems certain Dr. Fauci is wrong. About what? Maybe I’m being unfair, but I’d be willing to bet money this fellow has only a vague idea of anything Dr. Fauci ever said about anything and couldn’t defend his opinion that the doctor is wrong if his life depended on it. Fauci is wrong because of what he represents, namely the satanic forces calling for mask-wearing and sheltering in place and other weenie things that manly MAGA-heads just don’t do.

Although some of the people in the various pandemic protests have worn mask, mask-wearing itself is quickly becoming a mark of one’s tribe. See Wearing a mask is for smug liberals. Refusing to is for reckless Republicans.

This just happened:  Oklahoma city ends face mask rule for shoppers after store employees are threatened

The mayor of an Oklahoma city amended an emergency declaration requiring customers to wear face masks while inside businesses after store employees were threatened with violence.

Stillwater Mayor Will Joyce announced the change Friday afternoon, less than 24 hours after the declaration took effect.

“In the short time beginning on May 1, 2020, that face coverings have been required for entry into stores/restaurants, store employees have been threatened with physical violence and showered with verbal abuse,” City Manager Norman McNickle said in a statement. “In addition, there has been one threat of violence using a firearm.”

Joyce said in a series of tweets that he expected some pushback on requiring face masks but did not think there would be physical confrontations with employees and threatening phone calls to City Hall.

It’s increasingly the case that dealing with American right-wingers is a bit like dealing with hyenas. You can’t reason with them; all you can do is try to placate them so they don’t bite you. But the mayor should have enforced the law and thrown some of the hyenas in jail, IMO.

In brief, the Right has no ideas. It has no cause. It has no arguments. It has no agenda, other than maintaining the dominance of the tribe, its privileges, and its myths.

Jamil Smith wrote in Rolling Stone,

Perverting the Second Amendment and using firearms in lieu of a good argument is an American tradition at this point, particularly for white men. I mean, anyone arguing this is an “age of Trump” development needs to pick up a history book. This is some antebellum stuff here, some things that date back to before America was America. Violence or the threat thereof has been a method of political intimidation since time immemorial, and whiteness helps many escape legal or fatal punishment that others do not.

See also my blog post No Cause, Just a Movement from 2010. This was about teabaggers.

The point is that (a) the teabaggers don’t actually have a cause, just a lot of resentments; and (2) their slogans and symbols are displays of tribal dominance only. Most teabaggers have no idea what the slogans and symbols mean.

That’s still true. None of it means anything, probably. It’s all just reflecting the angry, twisted archetypes lurking in their ids. And you can’t reason with or compromise with such people, because there’s nothing there that would be the basis of any productive discussion or compromise. There’s just resentment. There’s just anger.

Demonstrators take part in a rally organized Thursday by Michigan United for Liberty on the steps of the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing, demanding the reopening of businesses. Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images

This photograph above of a large pack of morons in Lansing, Michigan, was taken bleeping yesterday. It’s enough to make one suspect that white people are congenitally stupid.

I can’t make out any firearms in that photograph, but we’ve all heard about the armed men who entered the Michigan capitol building to intimidate the legislators.

Protesters wearing protective masks gather outside the doors of the chamber room at the Michigan Capitol Building CREDIT: BLOOMBERG

These guys below, for example, certainly look like they’re ready for an open minded discussion. Or not.

Trump tweet, today.

The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire. These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 1, 2020

No, we don’t negotiate with terrorists. Sorry. Officials properly elected by the people do not have to make a deal with goons with guns.

These protests are picking up steam, and no doubt viral load, in several parts of the country. Somebody is going to get killed. And yeah, this really is starting to look how the Nazis got started in Germany.

A lawsuit alleging that Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home orders infringed constitutional rights failed to persuade a judge in the Michigan Court of Claims.

The plaintiffs in the case claimed that the “mandatory quarantine,” along with interstate travel restrictions listed in an earlier version of the order, violated their rights to both procedural due process and substantive due process.

“But those liberty interests are, and always have been, subject to society’s interests—society being our fellow residents,” said Court of Claims Judge Christopher M. Murray.

“They—our fellow residents—have an interest to remain unharmed by a highly communicable and deadly virus, and since the state entered the Union in 1837, it has had the broad power to act for the public health of the entire state when faced with a public crisis.”

I tried to find the text of the judge’s ruling but failed; it may be that the Michigan Court of Claims doesn’t put rulings online. There have been court cases involving a state’s authority to enforce quarantines and other restrictions on public gatherings, including the closings of church services, schools, and businesses during epidemics going way back, more than a century, and courts have found that such restrictions are within a state’s power as reserved to states by the 10th Amendment. The only times courts have denied a state the power to enact public health restrictions is when the public health emergency isn’t clearly apparent and the restrictions only fall on one class of people, such as Chinese immigrants in one old case. But otherwise it has been long established that states really can put temporary restrictions on people’s movements and actions during an epidemic. See The Pandemic, the Constitution, and Civil Liberties. 

Here’s a political analysis by Philip Bump from April 23, which was six days ago, about how Trump reveled in a downward projection of the coronavirus death toll in the U.S.

With 60,000 deaths, “you can never be happy,” Trump said at a briefing on April 10, shortly after the model revision. “But that’s a lot fewer than we were originally told and thinking. So they said between [100,000] and 220,000 lives on the minimum side, and then up to 2.2 million lives if we didn’t do anything. But it showed a just tremendous resolve by the people of this country. So we’ll see what it ends up being, but it looks like we’re headed to a number substantially below the 100,000. That would be the low mark. And I hope that bears out.”

By Trump standards that wasn’t an outrageous thing to say, on April 10. But he didn’t keep up with revisions.

“We did the right thing, because if we didn’t do it, you would have had a million people, a million and a half people, maybe 2 million people dead,” he said. “Now, we’re going toward 50, I’m hearing, or 60,000 people. One is too many. I always say it: One is too many. But we’re going toward 50- or 60,000 people.”

We passed the 60,000 deaths mark today. Models may show that the curve is flattening, but the numbers keep going up higher and faster than predictions said they would go up. It seems to me that unless there is a major slowdown, we’ll reach 100,000 dead sometime in June. That tragic number at least should blow the “it’s no worse than the flu” argument out of the water, although it probably won’t.

If anything, right-wing media seems to be doubling down on the claim that covid-19 is no more deadly than the flu. Chris Hayes went on a memorable rant about that last night.

Another example: An article by Joseph Curl dated April 28 in the Washington Times is headlined “COVID-19 turning out to be huge hoax perpetrated by media. Media hyped the virus and alarmed Americans to the point of shutting down the economy.” I am not going to link to it, because links just make it more visible to search engines, but it shouldn’t be hard to find if you want to read it. I wrote a takedown of it on Facebook. Curl repeats some of the same cherry-picked data to argue that covid-19 is no worse than the flu that I took apart on April 18 in Death by Stupid. The zombie arguments just won’t die.

Viral photo by Joshua A. Bickel, Columbus Dispatch, of Ohio anti-restriction protesters.

Curl also claims that a “major model relied on by the White House Coronavirus Task Force predicts about 70,000 dead by the end of August.” At the rate we’re going, we’ll pass 70,000 dead some time next week. Seriously. I notice Curl provides no links or other information on where this “major model” came from. It may be that this is the model Trump seized on to announce only 70,000 deaths two days ago. April 27:

President Donald Trump on Monday acknowledged more Americans would die of the coronavirus than he has recently predicted,now saying that the nationwide toll is likely to be between 60,000 and 70,000.

Yes, the nationwide toll for the coming week almost certainly will be between 60,000 and 70,000. Then it will be higher.

See Beware of studies claiming covid-19 death rates are smaller than expected. The authors are the dean of Harvard Medical School; a professor and researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston; a professor and researcher at the Ragon Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital; and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. The studies they criticize, conducted in California, appear to be the same studies cited by Curl to argue that the covid-19 mortality rate “is likely 0.1% to 0.2%.”

And regarding Fox News, see also Sean Hannity’s self-own by Erik Wemple in today’s WaPo.

Even when they’re proven wrong, the coronavirus truthers don’t give up. Remember Richard Epstein, the highly esteemed “legal scholar” who made a complete ass of himself claiming that coronavirus would kill no more than 500 Americans? He then claimed that “500” was a typo; he meant to write “5,000.” Hah. Well, Epstein hasn’t given up. Jonathan Chait reported on April 21 that Epstein has another essay out arguing that the official coronavirus data is completely overblown and doesn’t justify the economic shutdown. See Chait, Richard Epstein Can’t Stop Being Wrong About the Coronavirus.

This pooh-poohing of the worst pandemic of our lifetimes — so far — unless you’re really, really old — of course is in service to Republican political interests. But I’ll have to rant about that tomorrow.

Bloomberg is reporting that Trump is preparing to order all U.S. meat packing plants to either re-open or remain open.

Trump plans to use the Defense Production Act to order the companies to stay open as critical infrastructure, and the government will provide additional protective gear for employees as well as guidance, according to the person.

The order sets the stage for a showdown between America’s meat giants, which have been pressing to reopen plants, and some local officials and labor unions who’ve called for closures in a bid to prevent the virus from spreading. The president himself has long agitated for Americans to return to work and restore an economy crippled by social distancing measures.

Trump must be worried he won’t be able to get an overcooked steak or hamburger whenever he wants one.

Farmers are dumping all kinds of food, including crops, milk, eggs, and livestock, because the supply chains are screwed, and in response the Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Purdue, has provided more happy talk than help. Many expect big food shortages down the road, and there there are long lines at food pantries now. But Sonny Purdue tells us not to worry. Even so, Trump will see to it that meat packing workers — a considerable percentage of whom are immigrants — risk their lives to keep the meat coming.

Meanwhile, Trump lawyer and alleged Attorney General Bill Barr has sent a directive to federal attorneys to watch out for states going too far with their pandemic restrictions. What “too far” means is open to interpretation, I suppose. Barr has been under pressure from conservatives to get more involved in ending the pandemic restrictions to get the economy going.

Speaking of wackjobs, an Illinois county circuit court judge has issued a restraining order exempting one Illinois legislator from having to adhere to a stay-at-home order.

As some Republicans seeking to reopen the economy launch a full-court press against stay-at-home restrictions, one GOP lawmaker in Illinois scored an unusual legal victory on Monday — for himself.

State Rep. Darren Bailey apparently became the only person in Illinois, besides essential workers, who is now exempt from Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s stay-at-home order after a judge in southern Illinois granted a temporary restraining order blocking the state from enforcing Pritzker’s order against him.

Now, Bailey is evidently free to roam wherever he pleases, but he said Monday that was not the main reason he sued the governor.

“The governor was just clearly overreaching his authority and his powers,” Bailey, a farmer who represents a rural district in southern Illinois, told The Washington Post.  …

… In Bailey’s quest against Pritkzer’s order, the lawmaker argued that the governor’s continued extensions of the stay-at-home order, recently extended through May, were illegal. He charged that the Illinois Emergency Management Agency Act restricted the governor’s emergency powers to 30 days from the day he declared a disaster, which was March 9, without allowing extensions. The state sought a continuance of the case.

Here’s the especially odd part:

No, I haven’t found out why Rep. Bailey is uniquely harmed by the stay-at-home orders and requires special privileges to not be bound by them. Gov. Pritzger is appealing the ruling, obviously.

See also The Pandemic, the Constitution, and Civil Liberties.

It does strike me that there’s a lot of magical thinking going on out there among Republicans. They are still trying to will away the pandemic with their mind-beams rather than deal with the reality of it. There is reason to believe that ending restrictions prematurely will cause a resurgence of infections and death, which is not going to help the economy. On the other hand, it might be that sparsely populated parts of the country wouldn’t have that problem. The medical science people are still figuring out how this virus works. Without being able to test people, we’re flailing around in the dark.

Republicans, however, are certain the economy has to be re-opened now, because otherwise they are going to have to consider more stimulus spending. And you know the drill — all of a sudden, they care about deficits. So, they see the re-opening of the economy as imperative. But they may be opening Pandora’s box and letting the nasties out.

At Politico, Ben White writes that Trump faces the risk of a coronavirus cliff.

Republicans are trying to pull off a high-wire act over the next three months: Reopen the economy enough to get most jobless Americans back to work and off the public dole, while resisting another giant stimulus package.

If they fail, they’ll face a coronavirus cliff — an even deeper collapse in spending and sky-high unemployment in the months before Election Day. That could both damage President Donald Trump’s reelection prospects and put the party’s Senate majority at serious risk. …

… Republicans are currently betting that efforts to reopen states will be successful and the nearly $3 trillion already allocated by lawmakers — the largest federal rescue in American history — will be at least close to enough to start bringing the unemployment rate down and sending economic growth back up.

In other words, the priority is to get the economy working again so it doesn’t mess with their election chances. However, IMO, you have to deal with the virus first. All the mind-beams and happy talk in the world won’t do a damn bit of good if the rate of infections and deaths keep climbing. Economists keep saying that it’s not an either-or; meaning it’s not a choice between dealing with the virus or reviving the economy. The economy will not recover as long as the virus is spreading around out there. You have to deal with the virus.

See also Gabriel Sherman, Inside Donald Trump and Jared Kushner’s Two Months of Magical Thinking. The reason we’re in this mess is that Trump refused to deal with the virus.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, shared Trump’s view that the media and Democrats were hyping the crisis for political purposes. And for both of them, the biggest worry was how the response to the coronavirus might impact the health of the economy. According to sources, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, a fierce China hawk, and deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, a former China-based Wall Street Journal reporter who’d covered the 2003 SARS pandemic, argued to officials in mid-January that the White House needed to shut down incoming flights from China.

Kushner pushed back. “Jared kept saying the stock market would go down, and Trump wouldn’t get reelected,” a Republican briefed on the internal debates said (a person close to Kushner denies this). Kushner’s position was supported by Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council chief Larry Kudlow. Trump sided with them. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump minimized the threat in his first public comments. “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control,” he told CNBC. (The White House and Treasury Department deny Mnuchin and Kudlow were against closing flights.)  …

…Navarro and Pottinger finally convinced Trump to stop the flights when they showed him that more than 400,000 people had entered the U.S. from China since early January. “Trump was stunned by the sheer scale,” a Republican briefed on the meeting told me. “Navarro banged on the table enough to get the flights stopped.” On January 31, Trump barred travel from China. Even then, it was a half measure: the ban only applied to non-Americans who had traveled to China in the previous 14 days. American citizens could come and go.

Trump saw this as the end of the story—he’d taken strong public action, built his China Wall. Now, he looked forward to hitting the campaign trail and trumpeting the booming stock market. “He just wanted to hold rallies and watch television,” a former West Wing official said. “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” Trump told Sean Hannity during a pre–Super Bowl interview on February 2. He held a half dozen rallies over the next month.

Do read the entire piece; it’s fascinating. Of course, we now know that the daily presidential intellligence brief that Trump famously doesn’t read carried warnings about the virus beginning in January. So you had practically the whole planet sending warnings to Trump to deal with the virus, and except for the January 31 travel ban he ignored it all until the stock market tanked. He seems to have believed that if he just ignored it, the virus would go away.

Republicans seem to be making the same mistake. And I wonder, if the meat packing plants continue to be covid-19 hot spots, if we’ll even still have hamburger? If not, would Republican legislators volunteers to work in them? Not likely.

Trump spent the past several hours rage-tweeting. He is angered by the New York Times story that portrayed him as a lazy sot who spends most of his day watching television to see what people are saying about him, instead of doing his job. (Obviously that’s wrong; he also spends a lot of time rage tweeting instead of doing his job.) He is angered that the allegation that Vladimir Putin helped make him President refuses to die. He still hates the news media with a white-hot passion. He also posted an obvious deepfake video of Joe Biden making faces.

The tweets were full of the usual mispellings and odd capitalizations as well as weird misstatements about reporters returning their “Noble prizes.” I’d say Trump was losing it, but I’m not sure he ever had it to begin with.

A lot of these tweets were later deleted; here is a selection, preserved for posterity.

Here ya go. pic.twitter.com/oXyQIvivT3

— David Weissman (@davidmweissman) April 27, 2020

He’s obviously still stung by the firestorm of ridicule inspired by the “disinfectant” briefing. And he wants you to know that he is too doing a good job responding to the pandemic. Not a bad job, like the news media says. Aaron Blake, at WaPo:

Today he’s been cranking out gems like this:

Why should the people and taxpayers of America be bailing out poorly run states (like Illinois, as example) and cities, in all cases Democrat run and managed, when most of the other states are not looking for bailout help? I am open to discussing anything, but just asking?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 27, 2020

And this:

Blame the Democrats for any “lateness” in your Enhanced Unemployment Insurance. I wanted the money to be paid directly, they insisted it be paid by states for distribution. I told them this would happen, especially with many states which have old computers.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 27, 2020

Since unemployment benefits are administered by the states, I’m not sure how sending checks directly from some undesignated federal source would work. And it’s not like the feds have been all that efficient at getting checks sent, either.

See also Paul Waldman, Please, Mr. President: No more briefings. America can’t take it.

The word is that the coronavirus task force will no longer be holding daily briefings, with or without Trump. Maybe they will hold occasional hearings; maybe they will be muzzled altogether. The White House is shifting its messaging away from dealing with the pandemic to rah rah economy! “Expect to see a pivot from the White House in the days ahead, focusing on the economy and a more hopeful, forward-looking message,” a White House official said.

It appears there’s nothing on the agenda about addressing supply chain disruptions or the continued shortage of medical supplies and testing components. Talk of the almighty Defense Production Act seems to have faded away, since it’s clear Trump isn’t going to use it. I doubt that he understands how to use it. He seems to have thought he only needed to sign the thing and it would automatically just fix production, like a wind-up machine.

Instead, the focus will be on putting on a new kind of Trump theater, so that Trump can look like he’s doing something, but it will be focused on the economy rather than on the pandemic. The theory must be that he’s better at faking expertise on the economy than on medicine. And how did America come to this?

There’s a column by Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times that’s making the rounds on social media. It’s behind a subscription firewall, so it’s being copied and pasted. Here’s a link. Please do read the whole thing. It begins this way:

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

And it ends this way.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

The U.S. president is no longer “the leader of the free world,” and there is no way future presidents will reclaim the title. Eight years of George W. Bush was bad enough; during my 2005 trip to England and Wales, people kept asking me, “You do know your president is an idiot, don’t you?” The election of Barack Obama redeemed us in the eyes of the “free world” as having come to our senses. But then came Trump. They aren’t going to cut us any slack after Trump. If Trump is re-elected, we’ll be persona non grata to the world for the rest of this century. We pretty much are already.

The saddest thing is that We, the people have been rendered helpless to do anything about Trump as long as he is in office. What we’re facing with Trump is precisely the situation for which the 25th Amendment was designed. And the impeachment hearings and trial proved that Trump abused the power of his office and should have been removed from it. But we can do nothing because the officials charged with protecting the Constitution and the national interest are instead invested in protecting Trump. Our last hope is the election.

Daniel O’Hehir (what is it about the Irish and doom?):

What the coronavirus has shown us, if we’re willing to see it, is America as an imperial power in steep decline, revealed before the world as a weak, divided and ineffectual nation — albeit one with the greatest military force in world history. To put it in the mildest possible terms, that’s a dangerous combination; it might better be described as profoundly terrifying. … This pandemic has stripped away much of America’s pompous, self-aggrandizing façade and has made many aspects of the nation’s decline, and its fast-decaying claim to world leadership, even more obvious than they already were. …

… We need to stop pretending that America after the coronavirus, and after the Trump presidency, will be the same kind of nation it was before, with the same role of more-or-less unquestioned global dominance. We have deluded ourselves far too long on that front already. There is no making America great again, and it’s time to move past that. But there’s a real chance to make a better future for this country and the world.

So we end with a little bit of hope. But it hangs by a hair.

(Credit: www.dailykos.com)

Well, folks, The Trump Show may be cancelled. What may be considered one of the most hilarious dark comedies of the ages is about to end because the star — one Donald J. Trump cast against type in the role of “the president” — doesn’t like being laughed at. 

President Donald Trump has expressed growing frustration with his daily coronavirus-related press conferences, calling them “not worth the time and effort” Saturday.

The sentiment, coming days after an erratic briefing at which Trump incorrectly suggested that injecting cleaning products could help kill off the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, has been echoed by some Republican allies, who reportedly worry that the conferences hurt the party as a whole.

On Saturday evening, Trump lashed out in a tweet about how the media has responded to his press conferences, calling reporters “hostile,” while suggesting he has helped network news receive high ratings during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Yeah, the whole planet has been laughing its butt off at you, Donnie. Deal with it.

One bit of drama I missed until I read about it this morning — before the Friday live broadcast of The Trump Show, White House officials tried to move CNN’s Kaitlan Collins from her front row position to the back of the room, switching seats with the Washington Blade’s Chris Johnson. Both reporters refused to budge. The seating positions are worked out in advance by the White House Correspondents’ Association and are not supposed to be changed on the whims of the White House. Trump’s people threatened to bring in the Secret Service to force Collins to move, but she did not budge, and the Secret Service did not get involved.

There had been a brief clash between Trump and Collins the day before.

A few days ago I wrote a post that riffed off George Packer’s We Are Living in a Failed State at The Atlantic. Now Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money comments on the Packer article also:

An economy based on ruthless profit maximization by the owners of capital at the expense of all other social values decrees that workers must be vulnerable at all times to the whims of just in time supply chains, increasingly precarious conditions of employment — aka the “gig economy” — minimal or non-existent job benefits, and, most crucially, a shredded or imaginary social safety net, so that the whip of the ownership class can be wielded with terrifying effectiveness on tens of millions of people who are always only a paycheck or two away from immiseration.

America is a house of cards, and a strong breeze has, inevitably, begun to blow.

Sums it all up pretty well, doesn’t it? And if one couldn’t see it before the pandemic hit, it’s damn obvious now. The “relief” packages passed by Congress provided truckloads of money to big corporations without transparency or oversight while providing relative pennies to workers facing destitution. A New York Times editorial:

Many who lost jobs are struggling to register for unemployment benefits.

Only a quarter of small businesses have received federal aid.

Instead of providing for the people who are on the edge of destitution, too many in Congress  fret that too generous unemployment benefits will “incentivizing people to leave the workforce.” Indeed, the unemployment compensation system was designed to be punative, to be frustrating, to fail. The peasants have to be incentivized to take any job they can get, you know. Even when there are no jobs.

Katrin Bennhold wrote in the New York Times that Europeans have been stunned by how badly the U.S. is handling the pandemic crisis.

“When people see these pictures of New York City they say, ‘How can this happen? How is this possible?’” said Henrik Enderlein, president of the Berlin-based Hertie School, a university focused on public policy. “We are all stunned. Look at the jobless lines. Twenty-two million,” he added.

I’m predicting that by the fall, most of Europe and other industrialized democracies around the world will have — cautiously and tentatively — returned to something approximating “normal,” while we will be locked into cycles of waves of infection, and our economy will be tanking beyond redemption. It didn’t have to be this way, but I fear that’s how it’s going to be here.

And one reason we’re going to be more hurt than other countries is that we’ve been skirting by on the cheap for years, with the flimsiest safety net and most inefficient and  inadequate health care system. And that’s because every bleeping thing in this country is calibrated to squeeze whatever can be monetized out of natural resources and  people and send it up the food chain to the fabulously wealthy few at the top.

“America has not done badly, it has done exceptionally badly,” said Dominique Moïsi, a political scientist and senior adviser at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne. …

… “Europe’s social democratic systems are not only more human, they leave us better prepared and fit to deal with a crisis like this than the more brutal capitalistic system in the United States,” Mr. Moïsi said.

Eric Levitz, Coronavirus Exposes the Sickness of America’s Shoddy Welfare State

Twenty-seven million people in the world’s wealthiest country possess no health insurance of any kind. Millions more have coverage too skimpy to use for nonemergencies. Last year, a record-high 25 percent of Americans told Gallup that they or one of their family members delayed treatment of a serious condition out of concern for the cost of seeking care. And it isn’t hard to see why: The average deductible for an individual with employer-sponsored insurance has increased by 162 percent since 2009.

More than 33 million Americans lack access to paid sick leave. About half of all service workers (among them, line cooks and elder-care workers) cannot take a day off without losing pay. Meanwhile, thanks to our nation’s weak labor unions and at-will employment policies, many workers who do officially have paid leave are too afraid of repercussions to use it.

It’s gospel to American conservatives that providing citizens safety net benefits — also known as “handouts” — renders them lazy and shiftless and keeps them out of the workforce. In truth, the lack of supports such as paid sick leave, health care, and child care probably hampers productivity far more than the welfare recipients of Republican fantasy who are somehow enjoying carefree lives on government checks.

One recent study found that when states require employers to provide paid sick leave, influenza infections fall by more than 10 percent. There are also quantifiable ways in which failing to provide Americans with access to health care imposes cost on society at large. For example, there is some evidence that the financial insecurity and medical deprivation that low-income Americans suffer when they lack health insurance impedes their capacity to work: In Michigan, Medicaid expansion was associated with an increase in labor-force participation among low-income and nonwhite residents. Meanwhile, when Americans forgo early treatment of an ailment due to cost concerns, they often end up requiring even more expensive care — and suffering worse health outcomes — than they would have otherwise.

I’ve written a couple of times about the parallels between today’s Republicans and the English during the Irish Famine. As more than a million Irish starved — in spite of producing plenty of food, which of course was owned by the English — members of Parliament argued that it would be wrong, even immoral, to provide the Irish with food, because it would spoil them as a source of labor.  Timothy Egan:

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) https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/stopping-virus-huge-challenge-crowded-us-meat-plants-70300170