(Taking a brief break from focusing on the coronavirus to look at the upcoming election and funky shit going on about it in social media.)

Here in the middle of a historic national crisis, I’m still seeing people on social media say Joe Biden should not be the Democratic nominee. Maybe he shouldn’t, but here in Reality World, Biden is going to be the nominee as long as he makes it to the convention alive and breathing. There’s really no point arguing about “shoulds” any more. We’re past that point. Continuing to argue against Biden’s nomination is a bit like arguing that the Texas Rangers shouldn’t trade Alex Rodriguez to the Yankees. It’s done already.

By all means, go ahead and vote for another candidate in your primary if it hasn’t happened yet, and work to get out the vote for Sanders if you wish. And for those who don’t know me, I voted for Sanders in my state’s primary, which he lost to Biden, 35 percent to 60 percent. In 2016, it was Clinton 49.61 percent, Sanders 49.36 percent.

That’s the basic story of the 2020 primaries, in a nutshell. Sanders is not doing nearly as well as he did in 2016. That’s the hard reality.

Now, how much should Biden worry about younger lefty voters withholding their votes from him in November? Not too much, actually.

Biden needs some Sanders primary voters to support him in November, since Sanders has won about 31 percent of the national popular vote so far. But he doesn’t need every single one.

Note that Sanders received about 47 percent of primary votes in 2016, so he’s doing considerably worse overall now, possibly because younger voters are voting at lower rates this year and the union/working class votes he got in 2016 are now going to Biden.

Some Sanders-or-bust voters might stay home in November; that happens to some degree in every election.

But most Sanders voters don’t fit that description. According to a recent Morning Consult poll, 82 percent of Sanders supporters say they would vote for Biden in the general election, and just 7 percent said they would vote for Trump. And Quinnipiac University found that 86 percent of Sanders voters would vote for Biden, 3 percent would vote for Trump, 2 percent would vote for someone else, 4 percent wouldn’t vote, and 5 percent didn’t know who they’d vote for.

Of course, in a close election, every vote counts. So the Sanders voter factor is of some concern, but the Sanders camp doesn’t have nearly enough voting leverage to issue threats or make demands, sorry.

On the one hand, it’s possible that some of the anti-Hillary, conservative Democratic voters that Sanders won in places like Oklahoma and West Virginia are now Republicans who didn’t participate in the 2020 primary. But it’s also possible that a handful of those voters back Biden. For instance, he’s already been doing better than Sanders among white primary voters without a college degree, a group Sanders won handily in 2016.

So the tradeoff for Biden in 2020 may be that he loses youth turnout but gets more votes from suburban moderate types who are older. Given that older voters are more reliable voters, that might be an OK trade for Biden.

Basically, demographic groups who can’t be counted on to vote don’t get catered to by politicians.

Sanders’s argument before the primaries started was that he would do better with union and working-class and younger voters, as he did in the 2016 primaries. Younger voters in particular were anticipated to show up in record numbers. But the union/working-class vote has been going to Biden, and the youth vote turnout has been lower than in 2016. And Biden has been crushing Sanders with African-American and suburban voters, two groups considered most vital to beating Trump in November.

And no, there are no exit polls that show that Sanders should have won a lot of primaries that he lost but the evil DNC somehow changed the vote in spite of the fact that the DNC doesn’t run primaries; state election commissions run primaries. I keep seeing claims of these exit polls, but I have looked and looked and have yet to find solid evidence of one. I believe if such exit polls existed we’d be hearing about it from the Sanders campaign.

What about independent voters? I understand independents have preferred Sanders to Biden in several primaries, but that tells us nothing about how they are going to vote in November. And there are polls that show lefty-leaning independents preferring Biden to Sanders. Independents are not a monolithic group, but at the end of the day most independents lean toward one of the two parties and will vote for the nominee of the party they prefer, even if that nominee wasn’t their first choice. That’s the historic pattern.

The real determining factor in November is how badly independent voters will want to get rid of Trump. Few are going to think, “Gee, I hate Donald Trump with a white-hot passion, but I guess I won’t vote for Joe Biden because he wasn’t the best nominee.” No; they will vote for a bleeping gerbil to get rid of Trump.

On the other hand, if by November Trump doesn’t seem to be doing that badly, he could win a second term, and that would be true no matter who the Dem nominee is. In a close election, incumbents do have an advantage.

So, to those who haven’t yet adjusted to reality, please stop embarassing yourself with empty boasts about how millions of disaffected people will somehow do something that will teach the DNC a lesson. If it didn’t happen during the primaries, it’s not going to happen, period.

If you want to be useful, do whatever you can do to elect Democrats to the Senate and House. Because it’s really going to be Congress, not the president, who decides if the Green New Deal or Medicare for All becomes law. And, frankly, even if Sanders somehow sweeps the rest of the primaries and becomes POTUS, neither is likely to happen in a first term. Paul Krugman, last January:

Dan Patrick, Lt. Governor of Texas, got some attention when he asked older Americans to give their lives for the economy.

The premise of Patrick’s argument is, of course, since only the old folks die from Covid 19, aka “Trump flu,” it should be okay with them if we stop restricting economic activity and go back to work. If some old folks have to die off to save the economy, so be it. Seriously, that’s what he said.

First, let’s be clear that people of all ages are dying of Trump flu. A 31-year-old woman with no known medical issues just died in St. Louis. And a child has just died in Los Angeles County. Younger people shouldn’t assume they don’t need to worry. But Lt. Gov. Patrick has exposed something dark and ugly about his values. Do economies exist to serve people, or do people exist to serve economies? Clearly, Lt. Gov. Patrick believes the latter. Most Republicans and many neoliberal Democrats believe the latter. And by “the economy” is meant a means to generate great wealth for the few by exploiting the many.

For his part, Trump is tired of the virus and has gone back to wishing it away.

President Trump, in the latest signal of his mounting frustration with the economic impact of the coronavirus, is back to inaccurately comparing the death rates of the virus to the seasonal flu in order to justify calling for the reopening the economy in the near future—possibly as soon as Monday.

“We lose thousands of people a year to the flu, we never turn the country off,” Trump said during Fox News’ Tuesday coronavirus special. “We lose much more than that to automobile accidents. We didn’t call up the automobile companies and say, ‘Stop making cars, we don’t want any cars anymore.’ We have to get back to work.”

Trump then appeared to argue that the economic damage of keeping social distancing measures in place would bring a greater loss of life than the increase of deaths that experts have warned would come after ending the restrictions. “You’re going to lose more people by putting the country into a depression,” he said.

He’s going back to arguing that Covid 19 is no worse than the flu. He wants to order an end to the restrictions on business. The problem with that is that he isn’t the one who ordered a start to the restrictions on business. It’s governors, mayors, and other local officials who have done that, and few of these people are likely to lift restrictions on Trump’s say-so. His calculus appears to be that those governors, mayors, and other local officials can own the shutdown.

And yes, he’s very unhappy with the restrictions, for some reason.

So now much of the Right has concluded that We (or, rather, some other people We don’t know) Must Be Willing to Die for the Greater Good, the “greater good” being not inconveniencing rich people. Required reading today is Charles Pierce, No Thanks, I Will Not Immolate Myself on the Altar of Your Stock Portfolio.

Over the past couple of days, the response in certain quarters has turned ghoulish. Quite simply, it is becoming a kind of revealed wisdom on the right that we’re going to have to take some casualties—especially among we Olds—to get the economy moving again. … I’m telling you, by the weekend, screw-it-everybody-dies-sometimes will be Republican gospel. We’ll all be spring breakers on South Padre Island.

Dan Patrick isn’t even the worst example. “R.R. Reno, the editor of First Things, American Catholicism’s most prominent Pius IX fanzine, explained at length that demonic forces may be at work in the efforts to keep people from being dead,” Pierce writes. Yes, Reno believes demonic forces are at work in the pandemic, and we citizens have a duty to put our lives on the line and fulfill our economic functions, or Satan wins.

Note that Liberty University students have been ordered back to campus, over the objections of pretty much everyone in Virginia.

A writer to Talking Points Memo:

The comments I heard went something like this, “This is going to sound bad, but 2% really isn’t that many people and it’s mostly old people anyway. They’ve lived a good life. Overpopulation is a major problem and it will also help with social security.”

I’m writing in because I fear we are treating this as a more fringe idea than it actually is. I don’t think this is Trump reacting to his properties being forced to close or to a Fox News segment he saw. I think this has serious legs. …

It’s part Ebeenezer Scrooge morality; part inability/unwillingness to comprehend the scope of horror coronavirus is capable of inflicting on us. Of course, implicit in their thinking is that it won’t affect them.

We must be clear-eyed about what we’re up against. These people absolutely do not give a shit if 2.2 million people die. And they lack the imagination to understand what exceeding our hospital bed capacity by 30X looks like.

I really don’t think this is Trump sending out a trial balloon by himself. This is mainline Republican thinking and we should act accordingly.

See also Dana Milbank, Trump risks the lives of millions to save himself.

In Related News — There may be a vote on the Senate phase 3 stimulus bill this evening. Word is that the Republicans agreed to allow an inspector general and a five-person congressional panel to oversee the half trillion pot of money for corporations. I’d rather there were no half trillion pot at all, but at least this will make it harder for Mnuchin to use the fund to reward Trump and his campaign contributors.

I’m reading that the Senate has nearly come to blows over the third stimulus bill. Democrats need to hold their ground; it’s a terrible bill. This Vox article explains the main ponts of contention pretty clearly. See also Greg Sargent, The GOP just smuggled another awful provision into the stimulus and Paul Waldman, Why we can’t trust Trump on the big bailout ‘slush fund.’

The primary issue is the “slush fund” which would give Steve Mnuchin a half trillion dollars to hand out to corporations enitrely at Mnuchin’s discretion, with no transparency whatsoever. Mnuchin is thoroughly corrupt; I wouldn’t trust him to watch my coffee for ten seconds. See Charles Pierce, No Thinking Person Would Vote to Give Steven Mnuchin a Blank Check.

Five GOP senators are in quarantine — Rand Paul is infected — and Mitch McConnell is resisting holding a remote vote. The Republican 53-47 majority has shrunk to 48-47, and Republicans need 60 votes to move forward. And so far, the Democrats have been united. Even Joe Manchin is refusing to switch sides and got into a shouting match with Mitch McConnell today —

“You can throw all the money at Wall Street you want to,” Manchin said after McConnell blamed Democrats for a stalled stimulus bill. “People are afraid to leave their homes. They’re afraid of the health care. I’ve got workers who don’t have masks. I’ve got health care workers who don’t have gowns.”

“And it looks like we’re worried more about the economy than we are the health care and the wellbeing of the people of America,” the West Virginia senator complained.

Good for you, Senator. But as it is, the Senate can’t do anything without some Democratic votes, and so far the Dems are standing together. We’ll see if McConnell budges. No doubt the plan all along was to slam the Dems on obstructionism, anyway. But they need to pass a bill. Somebody must budge.

The NY Times editorial board:

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky failed to do his job this weekend. As the economy spiraled downward, Mr. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said he would produce a bipartisan bailout bill authorizing an infusion of desperately needed aid.

Instead, Mr. McConnell emerged on Sunday evening with a bill that would provide a lot of help for corporate executives and shareholders, and not nearly enough for American workers. It would let the Treasury Department hand out hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations — potentially including businesses owned by President Trump — without requiring a binding commitment to preserve jobs and wages. And the bailouts could remain secret for six months.

Senate Democrats, refusing to play along, blocked the bill in a procedural vote on Sunday night and again on Monday afternoon. But responsibility for the deadlock rests squarely on Mr. McConnell’s shoulders.

The markets fell further today, which no doubt has the Creature in the White House enraged. It’s up to you, Mitch. As I write this Trump is on the teevee saying the Senate should pass the bill as written. This should not be a time for political agendas, he says. Like that GOP isn’t a political agenda?

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., joined from left by Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, dismisses the impeachment process against President Donald Trump saying, “I’m not an impartial juror. This is a political process,” as he meets with reporters at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

In an all-hands-on-deck crisis, those whose priorities lie elsewhere do stand out. For example, the wingnut attorney general of Ohio is using the pandemic as an excuse to close the state’s abortion clinics. AG Bill Barr has used the crisis to ask Congress to suspend habeas corpus and other rights, which beside being a terrible encroachment on the constitution just plain makes no sense. The request was rejected on a bipartisan basis.

It’s clear that Trump’s priority is blaming China. He is doubling down on calling Covid-19 the “Chinese virus” and complains that China could have kept it contained, a big change from his tune of a few weeks ago. This is too obviously an attempt to deflect blame for Trump’s own negligence, which has been massive. Republicans have joined in —

At Trump’s behest, Republicans are blaming the coronavirus on China. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tex, said, “China is to blame because the culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that, these viruses are transmitted from the animal to the people and that’s why China has been the source of a lot of these viruses like SARS, like MERS, the Swine Flu.” Cornyn is a proud graduate of the Trump University School of Medicine.

This is, basically, the “Spanky did it first” defense beloved of small children.

The international community has work to do in preventing the transmission of viruses from animals to humans, but this doesn’t just happen in China. AIDS orignated in Africa, for example. The infamous “Spanish flu” epidemic of 1918-1919 may have originated in Kansas. This is an international problem.

And at this point it hardly matters how it started. Trump is still not doing enough himself. Right now we have a gross shortage of medical supplies. Right now medical personnel don’t have enough protective gear. It’s anticipated that very soon we will be short of hospital beds and respirators needed to keep people alive. And Trump is doing nothing.

Today, Trump tweeted that people should be blaming governors, not him.

.@JBPritzker, Governor of Illinois, and a very small group of certain other Governors, together with Fake News @CNN & Concast (MSDNC), shouldn’t be blaming the Federal Government for their own shortcomings. We are there to back you up should you fail, and always will be!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2020

Get that? Trump’s plan is to step in after the states fail.

Gov. Pritzker, who has been doing everything in his power about the virus, didn’t take this well.

Pritzker responded to Trump on Twitter soon after, saying, “You wasted precious months when you could’ve taken action to protect Americans & Illinoisans.”

“You should be leading a national response instead of throwing tantrums from the back seat,” he added. “Where were the tests when we needed them? Where’s the PPE [personal protective equipment]? Get off Twitter & do your job.” …

… Speaking with CNN’s “State of the Union,” Pritzker said the federal government’s response to the crisis has improved since earlier this month but that Illinois has received only about a quarter of the personal protective equipment that it has requested from the Trump administration.

“We … got a call this morning, before I went on the air, that we’re going to receive another shipment of PPE later today or tomorrow from FEMA,” he said. “But it’s a fraction still of what we have requested. We need millions of masks and hundreds of thousands of gowns and gloves and the rest. And, unfortunately, we’re getting still just a fraction of that.”

Pritzker said that, as a result, his state has to compete on the open market — against other states — for those items. Trump has pushed for states to secure masks and other essential items on their own.

“We’re all competing against each other. This should have been a coordinated effort by the federal government,” he said. “And the national defense authorization that the president has to essentially push this manufacturing really hasn’t gone into effect in any way. And, so, yes, we’re competing against each other. We’re competing against other countries. It’s a … Wild West, I would say, out there. And, indeed, we’re overpaying, I would say, for PPE because of that competition.”

Trump had already refused to help the governors who call him and begged for federal help.

President Donald Trump on Thursday put the onus on governors to obtain the critical equipment their states need to fight the coronavirus pandemic, telling reporters that the federal government is “not a shipping clerk” for the potentially life-saving supplies.

Appearing at the daily press briefing of the White House coronavirus task force, the president defended his decision to invoke the Defense Production Act — which would allow the administration to direct U.S. industry to ramp up production of emergency medical provisions — without actually triggering the statute.

“Governors are supposed to be doing a lot of this work, and they are doing a lot of this work,” Trump said. “The Federal government is not supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items and then shipping. You know, we’re not a shipping clerk.”

I honestly believe Trump is just too bleeping stupid to understand the situation and what needs to be done. He has a great opportunity here to be the big hero and bleeping do something, and still he isn’t doing it.

Regarding the Defense Productin Act, this is dated March 18.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday invoked the Defense Production Act to get medical equipment to hospitals in the fight against the coronavirus.

But don’t expect new masks, ventilators, gloves and goggles to show up in the field right away.

The Trump administration has yet to complete a comprehensive assessment, despite weeks of discussion about using the act to help prevent the medical system from being overrun, according to current and former administration officials. Even Trump said on Wednesday that he’s in no hurry to order the supplies.

Today the chief of FEMA admitting nothing is happening.

President Donald Trump has invoked but not yet started using the Defense Production Act (DPA) to get companies to manufacture critical supplies for the fight against the coronavirus, Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Peter Gaynor revealed to CNN’s Jake Tapper Sunday.

“No. We haven’t yet,” Gaynor replied when asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” if the Trump administration has ordered any companies to make critical medical supplies needed on the front lines of the coronavirus fight.

The FEMA chief insisted that donations and voluntary offers of assistance from companies are presently sufficient. “It’s happening without using that lever,” he explained, adding, “If it comes to a point we have to pull the lever, we will.”

Right now, Trump should already have ordered an assessment on what will be needed and where resources should be allocated, and the order to produce those resources should have been given. But Trump has done nothing.

I only signed the Defense Production Act to combat the Chinese Virus should we need to invoke it in a worst case scenario in the future. Hopefully there will be no need, but we are all in this TOGETHER!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2020

This happened Friday:

On Friday, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said he had urged Mr. Trump in a phone call to actually use the Defense Production Act to get going on producing more ventilators and other equipment needed to combat the virus, and that Mr. Trump had yelled to someone in his office to do it now.

I am not reassured.

Later that day, in a testy news conference, Mr. Trump claimed that he had already used the law to spur production of “millions of masks.” But Mr. Trump has a long history of saying things that have no basis in fact, and no company has disclosed receiving any such order.

In the most recent daily briefing Trump went out of his way to praise the private sector for stepping up to produce masks, ventilators, whatever, and that’s fine, but I’m betting no one is tracking exactly what is being produced and where it is going. A lot of that stuff will disappear into private hands. I can imagine that smaller publicly funded hospitals will go entirely without. And who is building facilities to provide for more hospital beds?

But get this — Trump’s offered help to North Korea.

President Trump has sent a letter to North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, expressing his willingness to help the North battle the coronavirus, North Korea said on Sunday.

“I would like to extend sincere gratitude to the U.S. president for sending his invariable faith to the Chairman,” said Kim Yo-jong, the North Korean leader’s sister and policy aide, in a statement carried by the North’s state-run Korean? Central? News Agency. Ms. Kim lauded Mr. Trump’s decision to write the letter as “a good judgment and proper action.”

In the letter, Mr. Trump “wished the family of the Chairman and our people well-being,” Ms. Kim said, referring to her brother by one of his official titles.

But Chicago can just go bleep itself, I guess.

But this is what we can expect from Trump. He can blame China all day long; it was his own negligence that let it into the U.S.

When Wuhan began burning with infections in December, the U.S. government took only illogical, inadequate actions to stop the virus’s spread: It banned foreigners from entering from China, but inconsistently monitored Americans returning from the country. The president laughed off the virus and the Democrats’ response to it, calling it their “new hoax,” which immediately polarized the citizenry’s response to precautionary public-health information. When the sparks of this conflagration hit, Seattle was aflame before anyone at the CDC had started to reach for water.

And, we might ask again, where are the tests? One more time, this was Mike Pence a couple of weeks ago:

And that was all a bald-faced lie. There were no millions of tests. Testing is slowly becoming more available, but not available enough. According to the Covid Tracking Project, a total of 228,216 Americans have been tested to date. But even if everyone could get tested tomorrow, it’s too late to talk about containment. Containment may have been possible a few weeks ago, but the federal government moved way too slowly. See How the Coronavirus Became an American Catastrophe.

By now you’ve heard that Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) is in big trouble for dumping stocks before the stock market crumbled. And you may have heard he wasn’t the only one. But Burr, who had already announced he would retire when his term ends in 2022, seems especially vulnerable, since even Tucker Carlson thinks he should resign.

Greg Sargent explains,

The revelations raise questions about whether private briefings that Burr, the chair of the Intelligence Committee, received from Trump officials about the scale of the threat might have influenced the financial move. As The Post summarizes:

Burr reportedly was receiving daily briefings on the threat of the virus. In mid-February, he sold 33 stocks held by him and his spouse, estimated at between $628,033 and $1.72 million, Senate financial disclosures show. It was the largest number of stocks he had sold in one day since at least 2016, records show.

Making this potentially worse, that same month, Burr privately advised a group of well-connected players that the coronavirus threat was very alarming — “akin to the 1918 pandemic” — even as Trump was publicly downplaying it.

But Burr doesn’t seem to me to be any more guilty than Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), who is running to keep her seat now.

The Senate’s newest member sold off seven figures’ worth of stock holdings in the days and weeks after a private, all-senators meeting on the novel coronavirus that subsequently hammered U.S. equities.

Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) reported the first sale of stock jointly owned by her and her husband on Jan. 24, the very day that her committee, the Senate Health Committee, hosted a private, all-senators briefing from administration officials, including the CDC director and Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on the coronavirus.

I seriously want Loeffler to be defeated.

When Loeffler assumed office, she immediately became the wealthiest member of Congress. The Atlanta businesswoman, whose husband is the chairman and CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, has a fortune estimated at $500 million.

Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA)

Next we move on to Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), one of the eight senators who voted against the first Covid-19 relief package this week, and who is also up for re-election.

A late January stock sale worth up to $750,000 was part of a continuing divestiture plan and unrelated to news about the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe said Friday.

Senator Inhofe says he wasn’t at the January 24 meeting, nyah nyah nyah.

The New York Times allegations are completely baseless and 100 percent false. I was not at the briefing on January 24. I was meeting with pro-life kids from Oklahoma here for the March for Life and the new nominee to be U.S. Ambassador to Tanzania.

— Sen. Jim Inhofe (@JimInhofe) March 20, 2020

Of course, none of the other senators who did attend the meeting would have talked to him about it, would they?

There is also a Democrat in this mix. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) sold between $1.5 million and $6 million in a biotechnology company’s stock in late January and early February.

Loeffler, Inhofe, and Feinstein say that they didn’t personally sell those stocks. Their financial managers sold those stocks; the senators themselves deny knowing anything about it. According to TPM, “Burr has since claimed that he dumped between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings in February, based solely on publicly available news reports.” The “insider” information he was getting as a senator had nothing to do with it, he says.

One suspects we’ll be hearing more about this. And it’s not just about potential “insider” trading; it’s about these people knowing the situation was dire but going along with the Trump Administration’s claims that everything was just fine and under control. Well, the Republicans, anyway. I’m not aware of Feinstein trying to cover Trump’s ass.

While doing some maintainance on Mahablog today I came across a post I wrote in 2007, On Our Own. It was about the Bush Administration, but it could have been applied to Trump.

I’d say what we’re really dealing with is not a lack of leadership, but negative leadership. By that I mean a stubborn refusal to deal rationally with the nation’s problems accompanied by an equally stubborn refusal not to let anyone else deal with those problems, either. The Bush Administration accumulates power and won’t share it with anyone, but neither will the Bush Administration use that power to anyone’s benefit but its own.

I say you could substitute “Trump” for “Bush” and it would still be true, except now it’s worse. As we’ve seen, one of the several reasons the administration has failed to respond to the pandemic is that Trump’s people are afraid to so much as breathe without orders from Trump. So the Trump appointees leading the CDC and FDA did not take actions that were within their power. This includes functions those agencies had exercised in previous administrations, such as quickly giving private labs the go-ahead to develop tests. Weeks were wasted.

There is also a fascinating parallel between the Trumpies and the Bushies in the way they stubbornly refused to heed warnings — about terrorism or pandemics — and then, like Condi Rice, complained “no one could have imagined” a warned-about thing would happen after the warned-about thing did happen. See Aaron Blake, Trump keeps saying ‘nobody’ could have foreseen coronavirus. We keep finding out about new warning signs.

Back to what I wrote in 2007,

A year ago The Center for America’s Future released a report (PDF) documenting the failures of the Bush Administration to respond to Katrina. The Bushies failed to prepare, they failed to respond, and they have failed to rebuild. And behind these failures was more than just sheer incompetence; it was conservative ideology. The disabling factors were rightie disdain for government, their reckless determination to privatize core functions (placing blind faith in the market without oversight or accountability) and their fondness for “pay-to-play” politics, in which money capitalism and personal gain count for more than performance. These three “beliefs,” beloved of the extreme Right, are crippling America.

And, unfortunately, not nearly enough was done in the Obama years to push back against this nonsense. I’m being hard on Republicans, but Democrats have been way too accommodating to the whackjobs for lo these many years. That’s got to stop.

Mr. Ivanka, Trump’s pea-brained son-in-law, has set up what’s being called a “shadow task force” in the White House that is tasked with improving testing and health care delivery. He’s pulled together random people from private industry — officials from UPS and FedEx, for example — with some of his allies in government to work independently of everyone else in Washington and otherwise be in the way. Mr. Ivanka wants to bring “an entrepreneurial approach” to the pandemic crisis. Seriously, he said that.

Kushner defended his role in an interview, saying his team’s goal was to bring “an entrepreneurial approach” to the crisis.

One gets the impression that Trump finally has realized the coronavirus is a big deal (that could cost him the election) and that he should be doing something. The markets are rebounding a bit after the White House hustled out a stimulus package. There’s actually serious talk of sending some amount of cash directly to people, but I’m going to believe that one when I see it.

Paul Waldman:

“I’ve always known this is a real — this is a pandemic,” Trump said. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

That followed a press conference Monday when for the first time he seemed to acknowledge the magnitude of the crisis (“this is a very bad one”), amid the expected self-congratulation (“we’ve done a fantastic job from just about every standpoint”).

I sincerely hope that Michael Bloomberg and his advertising team are putting together television ads replaying all the times Trump downplayed the virus and claimed it wouldn’t be a big deal. And I want to see television ads showing the time in 2018 Trump explained why he was cutting the pandemic team, juxtaposed with his claim from last week that he didn’t know anything about it. And I sincerely hope most Americans aren’t fooled. See also A new poll shows Trump’s magical lying powers are failing him.

The question is, can Trump and Senate Republicans do the right thing even if they try? Or will they water the stimulus proposal down, or make sure its benefits mostly flow to rich people, or add a bunch of abortion restrictions and dare Democrats to not vote for it, so that Dems can be blamed for not addressing the crisis?

Paul Krugman flat-out says that the entire Republican Party can’t do economic policy.

Why are Republicans useless at best in the face of an economic crisis? As I’ve pointed out before, there are many competent center-right economists, but the G.O.P. — not just Trump, but the whole party — doesn’t want their advice. It prefers hacks and propagandists, the people Mankiw famously called “charlatans and cranks,” whose only idea is tax cuts. The party truly has nobody left who is capable of putting together a plausible economic rescue package.

The Senate probably will eventually pass Pelosi’s bill. But with all signs pointing to a steep economic dive, we need a much bigger stimulus package — perhaps along the lines being developed by Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader — as soon as possible. This package shouldn’t include tax cuts; it should focus overwhelmingly on cash grants, perhaps a basic grant to every legal resident plus additional grants to those in special need.

And since there’s nobody left in the G.O.P. who can put together a coherent stimulus plan, Democrats will have to do the job, perhaps with help from the Federal Reserve intervention to stabilize highly stressed financial markets.

Economists agree that Trump’s favorite idea — a payroll tax cut — is a bad idea, mostly because it does nothing for those not getting a paycheck. But maybe he’ll warm to the cash giveaway, thinking it will buy him some votes.

David Atkins has an excellent analysis at Washington Monthly, Trump Is Running a Pandemic Response Like a Business, With Disastrous Results. This goes further than just explaining why Trump is screwing up; it explains why Republican ideas about the government’s role in the economy are screwed up, and why government must not be run like a business.

Today’s fast-moving capital markets are explicitly designed to be reactive rather than proactive, and every incentive built into them is to push for growth at all costs. Problems are meant to be pushed to the side and out of sight so the good times can keep rolling at the top; inconvenient costs are externalized and socialized on the backs of workers, the impoverished, and the environment. In the best of times, this dynamic creates massive inequalities and injustices that the market doesn’t notice, because the victims most affected are insignificant to—and go unnoticed by—the invisible hand. In the worst of times, however, it utterly hobbles a society’s ability to respond to crises that require active management before they can be directly felt in the marketplace.

Do read the whole thing. In short, business is always pushing to find the shortest route to profit. “Crisis management” in business is mostly viewed as a problem of reducing liability and maximizing public relations after something goes wrong. If possible, the damage and cost of a problem are pushed off on someone else (often the government). But by the time business notices there is a problem, it’s too late to stop it. “It’s true of any problem with an exponential curve whose solution requires acting well before the curve turns irrevocably steep, but where the action to prevent it would impact corporate profits,” Atkins writes.

As Trump said when he explained disbanding the pandemic team, “I’m a business person, I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them.” But by the time you realize you need them, you’re already way behind the curve. It’s like waiting until there’s a fire to start hiring firefighters.

There are a lot of “insider” looks at how the Trump White House mismanaged the crisis. See, for example:

Gabriel Sherman, Vanity Fair, “There’s No Boogeyman He Can Attack”: Angry at Kushner, Trump Awakens to the COVID-19 Danger

Julia Ioffe, GQ, The Infuriating Story of How the Government Stalled Coronavirus Testing

Maggie Haberman and Noah Weiland, New York Times, Inside the Coronavirus Response: A Case Study in the White House Under Trump

DALLAS, TX – SEPTEMBER 14: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the American Airlines Center on September 14, 2015 in Dallas, Texas. More than 20,000 tickets have been distributed for the event. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images)

 

In The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum writes that the coronavirus pandemic could utterly change how America sees itself. It could even have an impact similar to Matthew Perry’s steamships in Tokyo Bay, 1853. And I’ll come back to that.

What if it turns out, as it almost certainly will, that other nations are far better than we are at coping with this kind of catastrophe? Look at Singapore, which immediately created an app that could physically track everyone who was quarantined, and that energetically tracked down all the contacts of everyone identified to have the disease. Look at South Korea, with its proven testing ability. Look at Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel managed to speak honestly and openly about the disease—she predicted that 70 percent of Germans would get it—and yet did not crash the markets.

The United States, long accustomed to thinking of itself as the best, most efficient, and most technologically advanced society in the world, is about to be proved an unclothed emperor. When human life is in peril, we are not as good as Singapore, as South Korea, as Germany.

That depends on what happens in the next few weeks, of course. Maybe our social distancing and hand washing will be enough to limit the pandemic’s reach, and most of us will be untouched. It’s not impossible that our vast rural areas, so sparsely populated but so over-represented in the Electoral College, will not see much of the disease. In that case, expect a mass whining that it was all overblown and those libtards in the cities are just snowflakes.

However, I understand the S&P 500 dropped another 12 percent today, and the Dow dropped almost 3000 points. The effects of that will ripple everywhere sooner or later. People are hesitant to say the “R” word — recession — but eventually some authority figure will declare there is one.

A painting of US commodore Matthew Perry’s squadron of ships, believed to have been painted by Hibata ?suke.

What about Matthew Perry? If you’ve made it to Chapter 8 in my book The Circle of the Way, you’ll find Matthew Perry introduced on page 241. The Tokugawa shogunate had introduced a policy of strict isolation of Japan in the 1630s. This was mostly a reaction to the European colonialism that was spreading chaos and destruction through Asia. For more than two centuries Japan allowed only limited outside trade, and that only through the port of Nagasaki on the southernmost island of Kyushu. The only foreign presence allowed in Japan was a Dutch consolate in Nagasaki. Foreign books were banned as well. Only the most educated Japanese had any idea what was going on in the world outside Japan.

Matthew Perry and his smoke-bellowing, steam-powered warships were a huge shock to the Japanese. The flagship USS Susquehanna was twenty-five times larger than any Japanese vessel of the time. The squadron’s seventy-three guns included artillery that fired 150 lb. shot. The Japanese realized they were helpless against modern military technology. Isolation ended absruptly, and in the late 1850s and 1860s Japan came to be overrun by foreign, mostly European, merchants.

Shoguns, military dictators, had been the de facto rulers of Japan since 1185; the emperors were mostly figureheads. But the stresses caused by the foreigners ended the last shogunate in 1868. The young Meiji emperor seized control, and in a generation Japan went from medieval feudalism to westernized modernity. I wrote about these events in The Circle of the Way because they profoundly impacted Japanese Buddhism.

But the social-psychological shock of change also had a lot to do with the militarization of Japan in the early 20th century. The Japanese still were a deeply conservative and xenophobic people, and all those centuries of military culture didn’t end because the emperor said so. So the lingering effects of the Meiji Restoration were not all positive.

Will the coronavirus be our Matthew Perry? Maybe a hundred years from how someone can address that. It’s hard to know what the long-term effects of a cataclysmic event will be. I would have thought that Hurricane Katrina, and the abandonment of a major American city by the Bush Administration, would have been a huge red flag that something is deeply wrong in American politics. But other than making a fool of George W. Bush, nothing much seems to have changed. The effects of the September 11 attacks appear to have faded, except we’re still stuck in overseas wars. The financial crisis of 2008 doesn’t seem to have taught us any lessons.

But maybe those events didn’t impact enough people. Perhaps an old-fashioned plague will be just the thing to force a great re-thinking upon us. But the impact of Perry’s squadron in Tokyo Bay wasn’t immediate, either. Getting ourselves unstuck from stupid will probably take the next few years.

In yesterday’s post about the elusive Covid-19 tests, I described Trump as a guy who has never held a real job and who has no experience working with complex organizations. His knowledge of work flow is limited to two steps: He gives orders, and then somebody carries out the orders. Such things as planning, procedures, protocols, and coordination are not part of his world.

So, brilliantly, he ordered travel restrictions from Europe on short notice, apparently without notifying allies or airlines and without consulting with federal agencies that would need to manage the restrictions. A stampede of Americans flew back before the deadline. They were then jammed together in huge bottlenecks in U.S. airline terminals waiting to get screened for coronavirus to get through customs. So if they weren’t already infected when they left Europe, they probably got infected at the airport waiting to get screened. Here was the scene at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport yesterday.

This is customs at DFW. Current wait time over 3 hours.
Coughing and sneezing… pic.twitter.com/TyFeYthKUG

— Jeffrey Barnett (@holajefe) March 14, 2020

And here is O’Hare:

This is the scene at O’Hare airport. The traveler who took the photo said it’s a 6-hour wait for bags then on to customs for 2-4 more of waiting in shoulder-to-shoulder crowds. Police are handing out water and disinfectant wipes. @fly2ohare #ord #coronavirus #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/UTx9E0nj1s

— Brooke Geiger McDonald (@BrookeGMcDonald) March 15, 2020

Brilliant, yes? See Landing at Dulles Airport, I encountered a case study in how to spread a pandemic.

The pictures you may have seen only begin to capture the chaos. There was no attempt to enable social distancing; we were packed closely together. Two giant queues of people — one for U.S. citizens and green-card holders and one for foreign nationals — wound their way through the cavernous hall. I counted and came up with approximately 450 people in each section, for a total of just under a thousand. Many were coughing, sneezing and looking unwell.

When I inched closer to the front, I could see that a scant six immigration desks were in service. Two additional desks to the left had less traffic. These are ordinarily for people in wheelchairs; now, the wheelchairs were mixed in with the rest. When I asked a security guard about the other lines, he told me they were for people with a confirmed corona diagnosis. There was no separation for this group — no plastic sheets, not even a bit of distance. When your line snaked to the left, you were inches away from the infected. …

… Some of the agents were asking people to use the fingerprint screen — all fingers, then the thumbs. Mine didn’t, but I watched the adjoining one and was astounded to see that the screen was not wiped, sprayed or in any way sanitized between individuals, or indeed at all during the hour I had it in my line of sight. My agent asked me how I felt (the true answer would have been upset by your colossal ineptitude) and if I had been to China or Italy. (I had not.)

The writer, Cheryl Benard, goes on to describe much more organized and sensible procedures in other countries.

In Other News: Is Trump Trying to Corner the Coronavirus Vaccine Market?

Welt am Sonntag, which is the Sunday edition of the German newspaper Die Welt, reported that Trump has been trying to persuade a German company working on a Covid-19 vaccine to move operations to the U.S. Reuters:

Welt am Sonntag quoted an unidentified German government source as saying Trump was trying to secure the scientists’ work exclusively, and would do anything to get a vaccine for the United States, “but only for the United States.”

The Guardian elaborates a bit, saying that Trump allegedly offered large sums of money to get exclusive access to the firm’s vaccine work.  The company, CureVac, has denied “rumors of acquisition.” However,

When approached about the report by the Guardian, the German health ministry would only confirm the accuracy of the quotes attributed to one of its spokespersons in the article.

“The federal government is very interested in vaccines and antiviral agents against the novel coronavirus being developed in Germany and Europe,” the spokesperson quoted in the original article had said. “In this regard the government is in an intensive exchange with the company CureVac.”

The German health ministry spokesperson declined the opportunity to correct any inaccuracies in Die Welt’s account.

So maybe this report is true, and maybe it isn’t, but it sounds like something Trump would try to pull.

Recommended Reading

Infighting, missteps and a son-in-law hungry for results: Inside the Trump administration’s troubled coronavirus response in WaPo. Mr. Ivanka tried to take charge and bring some semblance of order to the administration’s response to the pandemic, but Trump blew it anyway because he appears to not understand anything that’s happening around him. Or, perhaps he just fell back on his long habit of overhyping and overpromising to make a deal.

Anne Applebaum, The Coronavirus Called America’s Bluff in The Atlantic. Applebaum argues that the coronavirus might finally explode our myth of American exceptionalism.

Update: Tonight is the last Democratic debate. I may or may not watch. At this point I’m resigned to Biden being the nominee, and I’m kind of exhausted with it all. But feel free to comment on it here, if you’re watching.

In his capacity as Virus Czar, VP Mike Pence on several recent occasions has promised us “millions” of coronavirus tests. For example:

Pence heads the Trump Administration’s coronavirus task force. He said the group reached out to governors from 47 states on Monday, and was “able to confirm with them that testing is now available in all state labs in every state in the country.”

“Over a million tests have been distributed,” Pence said, and “before the end of this week, another 4 million tests will be distributed.” Pence said. He added that, “with the deployment of the commercial labs we literally are going to see a dramatic increase in the availability of testing.”

Before going any further, let us review the first and primary reason why the U.S. fell so far behind.

On Saturday Jan. 11 — a month and a half before the first Covid-19 case not linked to travel was diagnosed in the United States — Chinese scientists posted the genome of the mysterious new virus, and within a week virologists in Berlin had produced the first diagnostic test for the disease.

Soon after, researchers in other nations rolled out their own tests, too, sometimes with different genetic targets. By the end of February, the World Health Organization had shipped tests to nearly 60 countries.

The United States was not among them.

It may be premature to declare, as one Atlantic writer did, that The Trump Presidency Is Over. But there is useful information in The 4 Key Reasons the U.S. Is So Behind on Coronavirus Testing.

The first of the Atlantic’s four reasons for testing delays is red tape. But it seems the red tape has gotten worse under Trump than it was for previous presidents. In past epidemics, the Food and Drug Administration moved quickly to give many labs around the country the authorization to begin testing for the contagion. Trump’s FDA didn’t do that. Even labs that had independently developed working tests were not given clearance by the FDA to go ahead and begin testing. So they sat on their working tests and did nothing. And the logjam didn’t budge until a group of top scientists petitioned Congress, and the next day the FDA allowed testing to begin. But weeks had been lost.

My understanding is that fairly early during the crisis the CDC had contracted with just a couple of companies, LabCorp and Quest, to produce tests. But I’m not getting a clear picture from news stories what went on with LabCorp and Quest. The more recent tests seem to be coming from a lot of places.

The second reason test development has been delayed is that it has been difficult for labs around the country to get samples of the new virus. And, of course, the government couldn’t be bothered to expedite that.

The third reason is an issue with equipment, which ties into our lack of a national health care system. The tests that have been developed so far are called “lab-developed” tests. Apparently this is a specific thing that requires specific equipment that most medical labs don’t have. Most labs are equipped to run something called a “sample-to-answer” test.

As late as this week, several lab directors told me that no sample-to-answer versions of the coronavirus test had been approved in the U.S. “That means that the vast majority of clinical labs in this country will not be able to do in-house testing at this time,” says Susan Butler Wu, an associate professor of clinical pathology at the University of Southern California.

The U.S. health-care system is broken up into state and county public-health laboratories, which have different equipment than academic research institutions, which have different equipment than hospitals that diagnose patients. So the same test won’t necessarily work in different places. “We don’t have a nationalized health-care system where you put the same equipment in all the hospitals,” Wu says. “We have all these independent hospital systems with their own equipment in their own labs.”

And the fourth reason is “leadership and coordination problems.” Ya think?

Going back to the inactive FDA that wouldn’t allow labs to procede with testing until prodded, one gets the impression that everyone in the Trump administration, top down, is afraid to breathe without  permission from Dear Leader. They don’t even exercise their own authority. And with no leadership coming from Trump, the various department heads have to work on their own initiative to coordinate their activities. But they don’t. Instead, the Atlantic says, there’s nothing but in-fighting and back stabbing.

Containing a new infectious disease requires a lot of close collaboration between the president, the CDC, the FDA, and other parts of the Department of Health and Human Services, several Obama-era health officials told me. “One reason we were able to move quickly [during the Ebola outbreak] was that there was a great deal of coordination and issue spotting and troubleshooting that went on,” Hamburg, the former FDA commissioner, told me.

Trump’s people don’t do coordination. They don’t issue-spot or troubleshoot. They just blame each other for the screwups.

At WaPo, Paul Waldman lists Nine reasons Trump is uniquely incapable of managing crises — including this one.  It’s a legitimate list, but I think it leaves out the one, over-arching reason, which is that Trump has no experience whatsoever working within a complex, hierarchical organization. That’s one of the reasons he has no appreciation for coordination. Time and time again, for example, he’ll kick off some major change in policy without notifying key allies or stakeholders or the agencies that will have to carry it out. He did it this week with the Europe travel restrictions; neither airlines nor European allies were notified before the announcement was made.

In the kind of close family business he’s always run you can get away with that. In any large and complex organization with many interacting parts, you can’t. This is what I’ve seen in Trump over and over again — a guy who has never had a real job and has no clue how organizations function. And he is utterly disinterested in learning.

Reporting has also hinted that even people who tried to alert Trump that the coronavirus could be a serious issue didn’t give him the whole picture of how bad it could get.

In the case of Alex Azar, he did go to the president in January. He did push past resistance from the president’s political aides to warn the president the new coronavirus could be a major problem. There were aides around Trump – Kellyanne Conway had some skepticism at times that this was something that needed to be a presidential priority.

But at the same time, Secretary Azar has not always given the president the worst-case scenario of what could happen. My understanding is he did not push to do aggressive additional testing in recent weeks, and that’s partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak, and the president had made clear – the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential reelection this fall.

I am betting no one in the administration has the courage to bring Trump really bad news that he doesn’t want to hear and face his famous temper.

Combine that with Waldman’s nine factors of Trump’s incompetence — such as his inability to plan ahead — and you’ve got a government that can barely organize a picnic, never mind respond to a complex crisis.

Read More

German Lopez, Vox, The Trump administration’s botched coronavirus response, explained

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, America Is Acting Like a Failed State

Maria Cardona, The Hill, Coronavirus exposes Trump’s greatest weaknesses

Carolyn Y. Johnson and William Wan, Washington Post, Trump is breaking every rule in the CDC’s 450-page playbook for health crisis

NBC, Mismanagement, missed opportunities: How the White House bungled the coronavirus response