Trump Promises to Defund Social Security and Medicare if He Is Reelected

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Yesterday Trump was said to have signed four executive orders that allegedly would take care of our economic issues. But he didn’t.

First off, of the four documents he signed, only one was an executive order. The other three were “memoranda,” which is something a president can use to give directives to executive branch agencies.

One of the memoranda was to the Treasury Department. It instructs Treasury to halt collection of payroll taxes from September 1 through December 31 for workers who earn under $104,000 a year. However, this is a deferment, not a cut; the taxes will still have to be paid. And payroll taxes add up damn fast. If I were getting a paycheck I would not want this.

But Trump has an answer for this. If he is re-elected, he says he will see to it that those payroll tax cuts are permanent. So if he gets another term, those deferred taxes won’t have to be repaid. But if Joe Biden is elected, too bad. And the punch line is that payroll taxes are the taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare. In effect, Trump is promising to defund Social Security and Medicare.

WaPo:

“If I’m victorious on November 3rd, I plan to forgive these taxes and make permanent cuts to the payroll tax,” Trump said at a news conference in Bedminster, N.J. “I’m going to make them all permanent.”

Presidents don’t have the constitutional authority to change tax laws, of course. Even if Trump is reelected, the Democrats are near certain to keep the House.

Steve “Foreclosure King” Mnuchin told a slightly different story to Chris Wallace on Fox News this morning.

“It’s a payroll tax suspension,” Wallace explained. “Isn’t there a danger that a lot of businesses won’t pass these saving through to workers because they’re going to hold on to the money because at some point, according to this executive action by the end of the year, those payroll taxes are going to be have to be paid anyway?”

“Well, the president wanted to do a payroll tax cut,” Mnuchin replied. “We could do the payroll tax deferral. He’s going to go to the American people and tell them that when he’s reelected, he will push through legislation to forgive that so, in essence, it will turn into a payroll tax cut.”

Wallace also wondered if executive action would cause a reduction in Social Security and Medicare benefits.

“That’s not the case,” Mnuchin said without evidence. “There would be an automatic contribution from the general fund to those trusts funds. The president in no way wants to harm those trust funds.”

“We’re already running huge deficits,” Wallace observed. “So how are you going to pay for it from the general fund?”

“You just have a transfer from the general fund,” Mnuchin insisted. “We’ll deal with the budget deficit when we get the economy back to where it was before.”

You might notice that Mnuchin isn’t saying exactly the same thing Trump said. Trump was talking about a permanent payroll tax cut; Mnuchin is talking only about forgiving the deferment. Still, it sounds a little like blackmail. Vote for Trump or you’ll owe the feds a ton of money.

Either way, this order is almost certain to face a court challenge. Critics also question what good it will do, since only people who are currently working will get the benefit. Exactly what is the point, then? Well, other than to help Trump get reelected.

Some experts writing for Business Insider say that many employers probably would withhold the “extra” money from employees, since they’re going to owe it anyway.

Seth Hanlon, a tax expert at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, told Business Insider it’s unlikely that employers would turn that cash over to workers, because of a fear of footing the bill when it’s due.

“Ultimately, if they don’t withhold, they’re liable for the employees’ share of the tax,” Hanlon said. “Knowing that, employers would be taking an enormous risk if they don’t withhold the tax they’re legally liable for.”

What else did Trump do? Well, another memorandum extends the supplemental unemployment benefit, but at $400 a week instead of $600. But not exactly.

Trump’s memo calls for federal aid to restart at a level of $400 a week. But there’s a catch: The federal government is only paying for $300 of that. States have to kick in the other $100. Many states are currently cash-strapped as they fight the coronavirus, and there’s concern governors won’t sign on to do this.

Of course they won’t. The states are broke. A bit chunk of what the Democrats hoped to achieve was money for states and cities, so that cops and teachers and other state and municipal workers won’t have to be laid off. Republicans say no.

And you know that it won’t work because Larry Kudlow says it will.

Back to WaPo:

There are also a lot of legal questions about the money Trump is attempting to use to pay for this. He calls for $44 billion of funding from the Department of Homeland Security’s Disaster Relief Fund that is normally used for hurricanes, tornadoes and massive fires to be shifted over to unemployment.

“The basic notion here is the president is rejecting Congress’s power of the purse,” said David Super, a constitutional law expert at Georgetown Law. “That is something nobody who cares about separation of powers can let slide, even if they like what the money is being spent on.”

It’s probably not going to happen. But Trump may want Democrats to fight him on this, so that he can claim the Democrats wanted to take the money away.

A third memorandum defers student loan payments until the end of the year. Interest on the loans is cancelled, but the principal is just deferred.

Finally, there was an actual executive order regarding the eviction ban that recently ended. HHS Secretary Alex Azar and CDC Director Robert Redfield are directed to “consider” whether an eviction ban is needed. No money is provided for this. One suspects Mnuchin, if not both of them, will say no.

Well, so much for that. To recap, all Trump has done is maybe defer some taxes and student loan payments that will still be owed, and the payroll tax deferment would only give some temporary extra money to people who are still getting paychecks and who, in theory, don’t really need it. The unemployed may see an extra $300 in addition to their state unemployment benefits, which is half what they were getting. It’s unlikely there will be a halt of evictions. And that’s it. No help for small business, states and cities, etc.

In other Trump news, this happened:

 

The Meltdown Continues

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Politico reports that Trump threw a screaming fit at his biggest financial supporter.

When President Donald Trump connected by phone last week with Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson — perhaps the only person in the party who can cut a nine-figure check to aid his reelection — the phone call unexpectedly turned contentious.

The 87-year-old casino mogul had reached out to Trump to talk about the coronavirus relief bill and the economy. But then Trump brought the conversation around to the campaign and confronted Adelson about why he wasn’t doing more to bolster his reelection, according to three people with direct knowledge of the call. One of the people said it was apparent the president had no idea how much Adelson, who’s donated tens of millions of dollars to pro-Trump efforts over the years, had helped him. Adelson chose not to come back at Trump.

I would love to know what it was Adelson said about the relief bill and the economy. I’ll bet that’s what pissed Trump off. It will be fun to see if Adelson decides to hang on to his money for the rest of the campaign.

The president needs the money. With less than three months until the election, he is overwhelmed by a flood of liberal super PAC spending that his party has failed to match. Since this spring, outside groups supporting Joe Biden have outspent their pro-Trump counterparts nearly 3-to-1, an influx that’s helped to erase the president’s longstanding financial advantage.

Now, Republican leaders are pleading to billionaires for help. Trump advisers are pining for new outside groups to form, and the White House is growing anxious to see what Adelson, who has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Republican super PACs over the past decade, will do.

I had heard that Trump was doing well with fundraising, but maybe that was money going directly into his campaign. Ironically, considering that Republicans have long enjoyed an advantage with PACs, this year PAC money is going to Democrats. And then there’s this:

Some of the president’s aides point out that, much to their frustration, he has shown less interest in super PAC fundraising than Barack Obama did ahead of his successful 2012 reelection. He’s also shown a reluctance to do the kind of glad-handing, cold-calling, and grooming of billionaires needed to cultivate a well-funded super PAC.

Others say big Republican givers are holding back checks because of the potential business fallout of being a major Trump contributor. After word surfaced that fitness company executive Stephen Ross was hosting a Hamptons fundraiser for Trump, patrons at his Equinox and SoulCycle chains staged a boycott.

With Trump trailing badly, some donors are more interested in bankrolling efforts to save the GOP’s Senate majority. Among the contributors who’ve cut checks to the super PAC for Senate Republicans but not Trump’s are hedge fund manager Paul Singer, investor Charles Schwab, and real estate developer Mel Sembler.

And some of them are just plain disgusted with Trump’s non-response to the pandemic, which they probably can see is doing huge damage to the economy.

And then there are the upcoming debates. It might surprise you that right-wing media have imagined that Biden will drop out of the debates. Well, that might not surprise you. The claim is that Biden is too gaffe-prone, too mentally unfit, to stand up to a debate against Trump. Trump, mind you. The guy who can’t pronounce “Yosemite.”

You can find all kinds of commentary on right-wing news (example) claiming that Biden is “considering” or “being advised to” cancel the debates.

After the recent disasterous Trump interviews with Chris Wallace and Jonathan Swan, one would think the Republicans would be trying to keep Trump locked in the White House bunker. Instead, they are making up stories about Biden being advised by this or that Democratic official to drop out of the debates.

We saw Biden survive the Democratic nomination debates. Did he do great? No, he did not. Other people did better. There were some gaffes, as there always are with Biden. But he survived. He did okay. For the most part, he won by mostly not screwing up. As incoherent as Trump has been lately, one suspects the Democrats around Biden are looking forward to those debates in the same way a lion looks forward to an old, fat warthog.

The Trump team, on the other hand, are flailing around looking for ways to game the debates to their advantage.

President Trump’s efforts to influence the timing and makeup of this fall’s presidential debates, some of the last planned events with the power to shift the trajectory of the campaign, have been rejected, with both the independent debate commission and the Biden campaign showing no interest in altering course. …

… Biden pledged in June to attend all three of the scheduled debates, a commitment that the president only matched in a letter Thursday, after the debate commission rejected a request to use a list of Trump-approved moderators and move up the timing of the debates. The Biden team has taken to mocking the Trump campaign’s effort to shape the rules and timing of the events, with one Biden aide suggesting that the president and his staff can Google the phrase “be there” if they have any questions.

The three debates were scheduled some time last year. They are managed by an independent commission that contains two former Republican senators — John Danforth and Olympia Snow — but no former elected officials who are Democrats. Trump has been complaining about the commission being biased against him for months.

The Commission did not “modulate” Trump’s microphone. The microphone at one 2016 debate had a glitch that made him hard to hear in the hall, but there was no problem hearing him on television.

I think what we’re seeing here follows the “projection” theory of Trump and of wingnuts generally — whatever they say about their opposition is really about themselves. Trump has been saying stupid, outrageous things on a daily basis, and the Trumpers are making fun of Biden. Do watch:

It’s true that in 2016 I thought Clinton did better than Trump in their debates, when in truth people just saw what they wanted to see, in both candidates. But now Trump has a record — a seriously awful record — to defend, and he has not exactly been on his game lately. The sales talk has turned to gibberish.

Trump and the GOP have been failing to land punches on Biden for months. According to this Axios article, news stories about Biden’s mental fitness peaked in March and again in June, but haven’t gotten much buzz outside right-wing blogs since then. The Hunter Biden and Tara Reade controversies have disappeared, even through Republicans keep trying to breathe life back into the Hunter Biden story. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, keeps holding hearings and investigations on Hunter Biden. But this is not going well for Johnson, and there is even some talk that Johnson is a Russian stooge.

A few days ago, the Trump campaign announced it was rebooting its ad campaign against Biden. This resulted in new ads that were just like the old ones, except for being more off-the-wall and hysterical. But everybody knows Joe Biden. Everybody knew Hillary Clinton, too, and a lot of people didn’t like her. But Biden is everybody’s affable Irish uncle. He’s just not someone to get worked up about.

In the debates, Biden may misspeak. Trump will misspeak. Recently Trump hasn’t been able to so much as read some basic, anodyne speechwriting without screwing up. He can’t even hold his temper to be nice to his biggest donor. My money is on Biden to be the one to get through the debates without making a total ass of himself. I’ll be very surprised if Trump shows up for all three of them.

Negotiations, and the Economy, Hit a Wall

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Negotiations on a relief/stimulus bill have fallen apart. It appears there will be no relief/stimulus package out of Congress anytime soon. I can only imagine the suffering and stress this is causing throughout the nation.

Paul Krugman writes that the many economic indicators ain’t lookin’ good.

But things could get much worse. In fact, they probably will get much worse unless Republicans get serious about another economic relief package, and do it very soon. …

… The suffering among cut-off families will be immense, but there will also be broad damage to the economy as a whole. How big will this damage be? I’ve been doing the math, and it’s terrifying.

Unlike affluent Americans, the mostly low-wage workers whose benefits have just been terminated can’t blunt the impact by drawing on savings or borrowing against assets. So their spending will fall by a lot. Evidence on the initial effects of emergency aid suggests that the end of benefits will push overall consumer spending — the main driver of the economy — down by more than 4 percent.

Furthermore, evidence from austerity policies a decade ago suggests a substantial “multiplier” effect, as spending cuts lead to falling incomes, leading to further spending cuts.

Put it all together and the expiration of emergency aid could produce a 4 percent to 5 percent fall in G.D.P. But wait, there’s more. States and cities are in dire straits and are already planning harsh spending cuts; but Republicans refuse to provide aid, with Trump insisting, falsely, that local fiscal crises have nothing to do with Covid-19.

Bear in mind that the coronavirus itself — a shock that came out of the blue, though the United States mishandled it terribly — reduced G.D.P. by “only” around 10 percent. What we’re looking at now may be another shock, a sort of economic second wave, almost as severe in monetary terms as the first. And unlike the pandemic, this shock will be entirely self-generated, brought on by the fecklessness of President Trump and — let’s give credit where it’s due — Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader.

We’re heading for something that will be much, much worse than the effects of the 2008 financial meltdown. Even if we can put better policies into place next year, the damage will take many years to correct. And this disaster will come straight out of our political dysfunction, not the virus.

Families are losing homes, children are going hungry, small business owners are losing or have already lost their businesses. People are dying who didn’t have to die. Schools are opening, or about to open, during a pandemic with no money for extra resources. And state budgets may not be able to sustain those schools much longer if they don’t get some help.

And let us be clear that this disaster is fully owned by Republicans. The most recent talks saw the Democrats willing to come down a trillion dollars in their proposal, calling for Republicans to come up to meet them in the middle. This proposal was dismissed as a “non-starter.”

Heather Long writes at WaPo that the U.S. economy is suffering through a “lost year.” No one knows what will happen next. Few can make plans. Businesses large and small are teetering on the edge of oblivion. The allegedly “pro business” Republican party doesn’t see a need to act. It’s like Herbert Hoover all over again.

And this brings us to Paul Waldman’s wonderfully snarky headline, Another impasse on the rescue package. Imagine if the president were a dealmaker.

What this deadlock needs is a master negotiator, someone whose extraordinary skills can break through the parties’ differences and craft a deal both sides can live with, giving Americans the help they need.

Someone like President Trump, the man who wrote “The Art of the Deal”!

You’re laughing, I know. But think about how extraordinary that is: During a difficult and complex negotiation, with incredibly high stakes for the country, we take it as a given that not only would the president of the United States much rather be off playing golf; it’s also probably best for everyone if he isn’t involved at all, because he’d only make things worse.

Actually, I wasn’t laughing. This is so sad.

And this is the man who sold himself to voters as a virtuoso of negotiation whose supernatural deal-making talent would enable him to break through any challenge the government faced.

And, while the issues we face are complex, the basic disagreement is not. Democrats want to do more to address the problems we face. Republicans want to do less.

Axios reports that Trump is “anxious to be seen as being in control of the process.” He can’t be bothered to take control of the process, mind you, he just wants to be seen as being in control. He is not negotiating with Democratic leaders. Instead, he is considering executive orders to cut the payroll tax (which pretty much everyone agrees is practically useless) and to extend unemployment benefits in some fashion and forestall the coming wave of evictions.

Even though these executive orders are of questionable legality and would do far less to aid the economy than legislation would, Trump gravitates to them precisely because they don’t involve negotiation. He can just sign a piece of paper and consider his job done. It’s a lot less work than hammering out a deal with Congress.

It’s a lot less work, and it’s also something he can do without anyone contradicting him. He doesn’t like not being in absolute control. And, in truth, he doesn’t know what a “deal” is. Here’s something I wrote after an earlier “deal” came to an impasse:

People keep calling Trump a deal-maker, but the truth is he doesn’t do deals. A “deal” means that two or more parties have agreed to terms for their mutual benefit, and that they all intend to abide by those terms. Trump has a long and well-known history of getting people to agree to his business plans by making promises he doesn’t keep and had no intention of keeping when he made them. Such an arrangement is not a “deal”; it is a “grift.”

Back to Paul Waldman:

As we look back over the past four years, it’s remarkable to see that Trump, who sold himself as a wondrously talented deal-maker, has turned out to be the world’s worst negotiator — when he bothers to negotiate at all. He hasn’t signed any significant legislation, apart from a tax cut all Republicans wanted (when they controlled both chambers of Congress) and a couple of bills that had plenty of bipartisan support.

Think of the deals he has claimed to have made. North Korea? Um, no. He said that if he pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal other countries would follow. They didn’t. Manufacturing jobs? Mexico paying for a wall? Whatever it was he was trying to accomplish with his trade war with China? Nope, nope, nope.

Maybe he should read The Art of the Deal.

I’m genuinely terrified of what Trump might try to do with executive orders, legal or not. He doesn’t understand anything that’s happening, and his staff are morons. Nothing good can come from this.

Recovery Rate, Survival Rate, Mortality Rate — What Words Mean

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Welcome to another edition of What Words Mean! Today we’re going to look at some medical terms. Full disclosure, I am not a physician. The most medical training I have was to get a first aid Girl Scout merit badge, ca. 1965. But I’m good at looking stuff up.

Yesterday I ran into somebody claiming that covid-19 has a 99 percent survival rate. This set off an alarm. I learned a long time ago, in arguments about U.S. health care, that “survival rate” doesn’t mean what we might think it means. We might assume that the survival rate of a disease measures the percentage of patients who get the disease, are cured, and go on their merry way, happy and healthy, but that’s not so.

“Survival rate” in medicine is a measure of the percentage of people who survive a disease for a particular period of time after diagnosis, or after the onset of the disease. Cancer survival rates, for example, are usually given in five-year increments. It’s the percentage of patients who are still alive five years after diagnosis. It doesn’t mean they are cancer free, just that they are still alive. If the same people all die of cancer after five years and one month, that doesn’t count in the five-year survival rate.

You might read that cancer patients in the United States have x percent higher survival rate than cancer patients in some other country, like France. And that might sound impressive. But if you dig deeper, you might find this means the American patients are living just five months longer than the French patients, not that they are cured.

There is also what’s called a relative survival rate —

A way of comparing the survival of people who have a specific disease with those who don’t, over a certain period of time. This is usually five years from the date of diagnosis or the start of treatment for those with the disease. It is calculated by dividing the percentage of patients with the disease who are still alive at the end of the period of time by the percentage of people in the general population of the same sex and age who are alive at the end of the same time period. The relative survival rate shows whether the disease shortens life.

Without knowing exactly what is being measured, saying that covid-19 has a 99 percent survival rate is meaningless. Are we talking survival after two weeks? A month? What? It’s too soon to calculate a five-year survival rate, obviously.

And then there’s “recovery rate.” I’ve seen a lot of claims that covid-19 has a 99 percent recovery rate. “Recovery rate” doesn’t appear to be a medical term. I found recovery period, which refers to how long it takes most patients to recover from a particular disease. Example: The recovery period of measles ranges from two to four weeks, or something. But medically, to say that any disease has a “recovery rate” that is figured as a percentage is nonsensical.

“Mortality rate,” very broadly, refers to the number of deaths in a population over a period of time, given as some kind of scale — for example, the number of deaths per 100,000 people. The mortality rate of a disease is calculated by the number of deaths by that disease divided by the total population. It’s not the percentage of people who get the disease who die, which I think is what a lot of us assume. Here’s a discussion of mortality rate at the Center for Disease Control. Mortality rates in epidemiology are very difficult to calculate, I understand.

What most of us want to know is, how many people who get this disease will die? And, if I get the disease, what are my chances of not dying? And we need to look at other measures for that.

Here’s a World Health Organization page called Estimating mortality from COVID-19.

There are two measures used to assess the proportion of infected individuals with fatal outcomes. The first is infection fatality ratio (IFR), which estimates this proportion of deaths among all infected individuals. The second is case fatality ratio (CFR), which estimates this proportion of deaths among identified confirmed cases.

Now we’re talking.

To measure IFR accurately, a complete picture of the number of infections of, and deaths caused by, the disease must be known. Consequently, at this early stage of the pandemic, most estimates of fatality ratios have been based on cases detected through surveillance and calculated using crude methods, giving rise to widely variable estimates of CFR by country – from less than 0.1% to over 25%.

In other words, we don’t really know, and it appears to vary a lot. For those of you who understand mathematics, the calculation looks like this:

My impression is that it will be a while before the epidemiologists have an IFR number they feel confident about.

Case fatality ratio is “the proportion of individuals diagnosed with a disease who die from that disease and is therefore a measure of severity among detected cases.” That calculation looks like this:

The WHO people say we won’t have a reliable CFR for some time. While an epidemic is ongoing, they’re making a lot of assumptions that could turn out to be wrong. “In the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen broad variations in naïve estimations of CFR that may be misleading,” WHO says. Again, it sounds like they don’t really know yet.

This page from Johns Hopkins looks at the CFR they have calculated for several countries. It varies from over 15 percent in the UK to 1.1 percent in Kazakhstan. The CFR for the United States is 3.3 percent. The page was updated today, it says.

(Update: I wanted to say something about the continuing claims that covid-19 is no worse than the flu. Just the raw numbers ought to have laughed that claim off the planet, but they haven’t. According to this publication, the CFR for seasonal flu is 0.1 percent. The CFR for the 1918 flu was 2.5 percent.)

In doing any of these calculations, we’re obviously at the mercy of a lot of inaccuracy. Nobody’s numbers are perfect. Any number anybody throws around, high or low, needs to be understood as a provisional thing subject to change. Nobody really knows how deadly covid-19 is. It kills a bunch of people, obviously. But to know what any one person’s chances of getting the disease and then completely recovering isn’t something anyone knows yet.

But I think we can safely say that it’s kind of stupid to keep yapping that covid-19 has a “99 percent” recovery or survival rate. That means nothing.

It’s also the case that we don’t yet know how many people will suffer some kind of long-term damage as a result of this disease. A lot of people who have been discharged from hospitals and are considered out of danger are still not recovered.

Athena Akrami’s neuroscience lab reopened last month without her. Life for the 38-year-old is a pale shadow of what it was before 17 March, the day she first experienced symptoms of the novel coronavirus. At University College London (UCL), Akrami’s students probe how the brain organizes memories to support learning, but at home, she struggles to think clearly and battles joint and muscle pain. “I used to go to the gym three times a week,” Akrami says. Now, “My physical activity is bed to couch, maybe couch to kitchen.”

Her early symptoms were textbook for COVID-19: a fever and cough, followed by shortness of breath, chest pain, and extreme fatigue. For weeks, she struggled to heal at home. But rather than ebb with time, Akrami’s symptoms waxed and waned without ever going away. She’s had just 3 weeks since March when her body temperature was normal.

“Everybody talks about a binary situation, you either get it mild and recover quickly, or you get really sick and wind up in the ICU,” says Akrami, who falls into neither category. Thousands echo her story in online COVID-19 support groups. Outpatient clinics for survivors are springing up, and some are already overburdened. Akrami has been waiting more than 4 weeks to be seen at one of them, despite a referral from her general practitioner.

The list of lingering maladies from COVID-19 is longer and more varied than most doctors could have imagined. Ongoing problems include fatigue, a racing heartbeat, shortness of breath, achy joints, foggy thinking, a persistent loss of sense of smell, and damage to the heart, lungs, kidneys, and brain.

The likelihood of a patient developing persistent symptoms is hard to pin down because different studies track different outcomes and follow survivors for different lengths of time. One group in Italy found that 87% of a patient cohort hospitalized for acute COVID-19 was still struggling 2 months later. Data from the COVID Symptom Study, which uses an app into which millions of people in the United States, United Kingdom, and Sweden have tapped their symptoms, suggest 10% to 15% of people—including some “mild” cases—don’t quickly recover. But with the crisis just months old, no one knows how far into the future symptoms will endure, and whether COVID-19 will prompt the onset of chronic disease.

You probably know that people who have had chicken pox might develop shingles decades later. We don’t know what’s going to happen with covid-19 patients, including the ones who remain asymptomatic. It might be years before we know.

Just be careful and don’t catch it. Please.

Missouri and Medicaid

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There are a lot of headlines today about how a Black Lives Matter activist won a primary over a ten-term congressman yesterday. The ten-term congressman is also Black and not a bad guy, but now Cori Bush will be the first Black woman elected to Congress from Missouri. She will represent the 1st congressional district, which takes in all of the city of St. Louis and a portion of northern St. Louis County, including Ferguson. This is considered a safe seat for Democrats.

Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner, the chief prosecutor for the city of St. Louis, easily won her primary to keep her position yesterday — 60.8% to 39.2% — and no doubt will win her general election as well. Until recently she was expected to lose the primary. But then came the McCloskeys and the badmouthing of Gardner by Trump and by Missouri governor Parsons. And a landslide was born.

The third happy result in the Missouri election yesterday was the passage of a constitutional amendment referendum to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. This was proposed as a constitutional amendment so that the looney tune wingnut legislature couldn’t block it with legislation.

This doesn’t surprise me —

Support for expansion came largely from voters in and around the urban centers of Kansas City, Saint Louis, Springfield and Columbia. Voters in Kansas City, Mo., for example, approved the measure by 87.6%.

Amendment 2 was rejected overwhelmingly by conservative voters in the mostly rural parts of the state that have the highest uninsured and poverty rates.

Voters in McDonald, Morgan and Scotland counties, which have the three highest uninsured rates in the state, rejected the measure by margins of nearly 2 to 1 or greater.

The key to Democrats winning anything in this state is to whip up a big turnout in the cities. I think Claire McCaskill lost in 2018 because she played it too safe, campaigning on being a pragmatic centrist, and the city voters were uninspired. I haven’t seen numbers, but I get the impression that turnout for yesterday’s primary was unusually high. This is encouraging.

And Gov. Parsons has got to be worried about his general election chances. It could be close. It was Parson’s bright idea to put the Medicaid referendum on the primary ballot, thinking that the lower voter turnout would cause it to fail.

Getting back to the mostly rural parts of the state, where people tend to be poor and uninsured — this is democracy’s great weakness, isn’t it? These people will benefit enormously from expanded Medicaid, yet they voted against it.

People of the rural areas in this state tend to be poor, uneducated, and bigoted. For example, next door Washington County, 95 percent white, has a per capita income of $18,915, it says here. 21.7% of county residents are officially in poverty. Instead of formal education, they get their heads filled with Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and holy roller preachers. Washington County voters said no to Medicaid, 63.53% to 36.47 percent.  But they’ll get it, anyway. A whole lot of them really need it.

But they are just way too susceptible to manipulation because of their ignorance. I’ve seen the mailers they got to get them to vote against Medicaid expansion. Taxes will go up! Illegal immigrants will get the benefits! Government-run health care! blah blah blah.

I blame both parties for this. The Democrats abandoned the rural poor decades ago. The Repubicans do them no good, but they are able to flood rural areas with right-wing propaganda to keep them voting for Republicans. I’ve been complaining about this for years. And Washington County folks will march to the polls and vote for Trump in November.

But yesterday, at least, the Medicaid initiative passed. And maybe eventually the ones who get on Medicaid will realize it’s okay.

Historic building in Washington County, Missouri. French settlers moved into the area in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A dialect of French was spoken there until well into the 20th century. The French settlers built “vertical log” cabins that tended to rot after a few years, but this one seems to have survived.

The Jonathan Swan Interview

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If you want to watch the Jonathan Swan interview of Trump, here it is.

I tried to find a free transcript, but failed. But a lot of it has been posted in news stories. In short, it is appalling.

Aaron Rupar at Vox:

Asked how he can say the pandemic is under control when roughly 1,000 Americans are dying from Covid-19 each day, Trump said, remarkably, that “it is what it is.”

“They are dying. That’s true. It is what it is. … It’s under control as much as you can control it.”

On the topic of America’s struggles with coronavirus testing, including long wait times for test results that render testing almost worthless, Trump resorted to making stuff up.

“There are those that say you can test too much. You know that?” Trump said at one point.

“Who says that?” Swan responded.

“Read the manuals. Read the books,” answered Trump.

“What books?” Swan challenged, but no answer was forthcoming. Instead, Trump said that “when I took over we didn’t even have a test” — as if the Obama administration was supposed to develop a test for a virus that didn’t exist until nearly three years after Trump’s inauguration.

A few minutes later, just as he did on Wallace’s show, Trump waved around pieces of paper with charts and graphs in an unconvincing effort to make it seem as though the US coronavirus death toll of more than 150,000 isn’t as bad as it seems.

“Right here, the United States is lowest in … numerous categories … ah, we’re lower than the world,” Trump stammered, which prompted Swan to respond, incredulously, “lower than the world? In what?”

“Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases,” Swan continued. “I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the US is really bad. Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc. … Look at South Korea: 50 million population, 300 deaths.”

Trump responded by suggesting South Korea is faking its numbers. But when Swan challenged him on that point, Trump quickly changed the topic back to his pieces of paper.

“Here’s one right here. You take the number of cases. No, look. We’re last. Meaning we’re first,” Trump said.

“I mean, 1,000 Americans die a day,” Swan responded. “If hospital rates were going down and deaths were going down, I’d say terrific, you deserve to be praised for testing. But they’re all going up!

There was a long exchange between Swan and Trump in which Trump kept insisting deaths were going down, and then Trump would say well, they’re going down in Arizona. (True, but the numbers tend to spike up and down, which may be irregular reporting.) The latest data I could find are in these tweets:

Again, the top chart does not represent number of cases, but the rate of positive results of tests. The bottom charts represent the rate of cases and deaths per million people. This ain’t good, folks.

Philip Bump at WaPo writes that Trump doesn’t appear to understand how bad the pandemic really is.

President Trump came prepared, or so it seemed.

When he sat down for an interview with Axios’s Jonathan Swan last week, Trump held a number of loose sheets of paper, each with a graph that, he clearly believed, showed how well the United States has done in combating the coronavirus pandemic. He had a graph showing the number of tests completed in the United States, for example, a soaring line rising above other countries tallying the tens of millions that have been conducted over time. Another had a simple bar chart, four colored rectangles demonstrating his administration’s success.

These were the emperor’s clothes, and he was proud of them. But Swan, given one of the few opportunities for a non-sycophant to interview the president, revealed them for what they were. Trump was left fumbling, unable to rationalize his repeated claims that all was well. Because, of course, it isn’t.

“Right now, I think it’s under control,” Trump said at one point. “I’ll tell you what—”

“How? A thousand Americans are dying a day,” Swan interjected.

“They are dying, that’s true. And you ha— It is what it is,” Trump replied. “But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it. This is a horrible plague that beset us.”

“You really think this is as much as we can control it? A thousand deaths a day?” Swan said.

“I’ll tell you, I’d like to know if somebody—” Trump began, then switched directions. “First of all, we have done a great job.”

He then went into his standard patter about ventilators and protective equipment. This has emerged as a standard defense mechanism for the president: What he’s done is the best that could have been done, and nothing he hasn’t done would have been useful to do until such time as he does it. The number of tests completed is an unalloyed success, although the slow ramp-up in testing allowed the virus to spread without detection for weeks this spring, spurring massive numbers of deaths. To Swan, Trump blamed this on his having taken office without there being a test for the virus — a virus that emerged in humans more than two years after Trump became president.

Seriously, in the interview he blamed Obama for there not being a test, and he gave himself massive credit for having eventually come up with a test, even though the U.S. was way behind the rest of the world in coming up with a test.

Even within the confines of Trump’s bounded successes, though, it quickly became apparent that he didn’t have a grasp on what was happening with the pandemic. He was holding numbers in his hands, but didn’t understand what they showed and, importantly, what they didn’t.

I think it’s entirely possible his staff is feeding him carefully, um, prepared versions of what’s happening so that he doesn’t have a meltdown.

“Right here,” he said at one point, showing Swan a chart, “the United States is lowest in— numerous categories, we’re lower than the world.”

“Lower than the world?” Swan asked. “What does that mean?”

“We’re lower than Europe,” Trump continued. “Take a look. Take a look. Right here.”

He handed Swan the sheet of paper, allowing the reporter, at least, to actually understand what Trump was claiming.

“Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases,” Swan said. “I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad. Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etcetera.”

“You can’t do that,” Trump replied.

“Why can’t I do that?” Swan asked.

“You have go by—” Trump continued, fumbling with his papers. “You have to go by where— Look, here is the United States— You have to go by the cases of death.”

Whatever “cases of death” means. Swan threw some real data at him for South Korea — Fifty-one million population, 300 deaths — and Trump just dismissed it as misreported statistics.

Bump goes on to explain that Trump is focused on the ratio of deaths to cases because, a few weeks ago, that ratio was looking pretty good for the U.S. The number of cases was going up, but the number of deaths was lagging behind. “Lagging” is the operative word here; time has passed, and the rate of deaths is going up now, too. Sort of the way winter follows fall and night follows evening. More cases will eventually lead to more deaths, although not right away.

“There’s never been anything like this,” Trump said. “And by the way, if you watch the fake news on television, they don’t even talk about it. But, you know, there are 188 other countries right now that are suffering— some proportionately far greater than we are.”

The example he used was Spain, which he said was “having a big spike.” Spain has been averaging 2,600 new cases a day over the past seven days and five deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins. The United States has seen nearly 60,000 new cases per day and a bit over 1,000 deaths. Looking at those number as a function of population — which Trump endorses here — we see that Spain is seeing 56 new cases per million residents each day and 0.1 deaths, compared to 184 cases and three deaths in the United States.

Again, my suspicions are that he doesn’t grasp any of this and is just using data his dutiful staff prepare for him to keep him from taking off their heads.

On Tuesday morning, Politico published an article looking closely at how the White House operates under its new chief of staff, former North Carolina congressman Mark Meadows. One White House staffer who spoke with Politico’s reporters said that Meadows and his team were protecting Trump from bad political news.

“I don’t know if they’re giving him the whole picture,” the official said, calling the group “Kool-Aid drinkers.”

Not that it would matter if they did tell him the truth. He still wouldn’t do anything about it.

Here’s more analysis from Aaron Ruper:

But perhaps Trump’s most tone-deaf remarks were reserved for the end when Swan asked him a string of questions about racial inequalities and his reaction to the death of John Lewis.

Presented with a statistic that succinctly illustrates systemic racism in the country — “Why do you think Black men are two and half times more likely to be killed by police than white men?” Swan asked — Trump dodged with an equivalency.

“I do know this: that police have killed many white people also,” he said.

After Trump claimed he’s done “more for the Black community than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, whether you like it or not,” Swan asked him: “You believe you did more than Lyndon Johnson, who passed the Civil Rights Act?”

“How has it worked out?” Trump responded. “If you take a look at what Lyndon Johnson did. How has it worked out?”

Here Swan asked, “You think the Civil Rights Act was a mistake?” Trump changed the subject.

The interview closed with what should’ve been a softball — “How do you think history will remember John Lewis?” Swan asked. But instead of paying lip service to Lewis’s record as a Civil Rights icon, Trump denigrated him for the pettiest of reasons.

“I really don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know John Lewis. He chose not to come to my inauguration,” Trump said.

“Taking your relationship with him out of it, do you find his story impressive, what he’s done for this country?” Swan followed up.

“He was a person that devoted a lot of energy and a lot of heart to civil rights. But there were many others also,” Trump demurred.

Small and petty to the end. There’s more, but you get the picture.

Trump: Old Dog With Old Tricks

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There is much breaking news today that the Manhattan district attorney is investigating the Trump organization for bank and insurance fraud, not just for payments to porn stars. Yesterday we learned that Deutsche Bank opened an internal investigation into the personal banker of Donald Trump and Jared Kushner. Given the past history of these two, I’d say the odds they are guilty of something are pretty high.

Speaking of history: Trump is reacting to the coronavirus just like he reacted to the lawsuits against Trump University.

Trump University, which shut down in 2011 after multiple investigations and student complaints, was treated as a joke by many of Trump’s political opponents — much as they treated Trump Steaks or Trump Vodka. But to those who knew the school well, it wasn’t a joke.

It was a premonition.

The saga of Trump University showed how far Trump would go to deny, rather than fix, a problem, they said — a tactic they have now seen him reuse as president many times, including now, in the face of a worsening pandemic. For months, President Trump promised something wonderful but extremely unlikely — that the virus would soon disappear.

Even through courts shut down the fake school and ruled that Trump owed $25 million in damages, Trump does not admit fault. If there’s a problem, he simply denies it (or blames somebody else) rather than fix it. And the way he handled criticism of his fake school is just like the way he’s handling criticism of his administration.

The judge was out to get him, he said. So was that prosecutor in New York, whom he called a dopey loser on a witch hunt. So were his critics, who he said were all liars. Even some of his own underlings had failed him — bad people, it turned out. He said he didn’t know them.

Sound familiar? At WaPo, Paul Waldman describes how the wheels are coming off Trump’s spin machine.

Campaigns and White Houses always seek “message discipline,” the state of having everyone repeat the same carefully chosen phrases and arguments over and over in an endlessly numbing drone in order to pound their ideas through the skulls of the electorate. It’s something the Trump campaign and the Trump administration have never achieved, for a few reasons.

First, as a group, the people who work for President Trump are not particularly smart or skilled at politics. Second, because they work for Trump, they are often called upon to defend the indefensible, whether it’s disastrous negligence, shocking corruption or farcical lies. And third, Trump is so erratic and self-contradictory that it can be almost impossible for them to keep track of which brand of lickspittlery they’re supposed to perform at any given moment.

So watching the Trump spin machine whining, clunking and throwing off sparks isn’t a bad way to ascertain just how deeply this president is failing, in both practical and political terms.

The article goes on to describe how some of Trump’s minions are better at defending the indefensible than others. Dr. Deborah Birx is now on Trump’s shit list for admitting “What we are seeing today is different from March and April. It is extraordinarily widespread. It’s into the rural as equal urban areas.” Which is a plain fact. But Trump complained in a tweet that Birx “hit us.” But others — Steve Mnuchin, Mark Meadows, Jason Miller — are steadfastly repeating the lie that everything is fine and just open the schools, already.

In other words, what we’re seeing now is a kind of concentrated version of what has characterized the Trump administration all along: a chaotic stew of fantasy and lies in which brief eruptions of candor from administration officials are quickly punished, but not before they highlight how ludicrous the prevailing line of spin is. And behind the spin is a reality of horror.

Because he doesn’t actually understand pandemics or science or much of anything else, he fakes and blusters and spins. And he also grasps at straws; quick fixes that might make the problem go away.

And this takes us to vaccines. Scientists are throwing up warning flags that the administration is pushing for a vaccination to be ready by October. As in two months from now. This is to save Trump’s ass in the November election, obviously.

“There are a lot of people on the inside of this process who are very nervous about whether the administration is going to reach their hand into the Warp Speed bucket, pull out one or two or three vaccines, and say, ‘We’ve tested it on a few thousand people, it looks safe, and now we are going to roll it out,’” said Dr. Paul A. Offit of the University of Pennsylvania, who is a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee.

“They are really worried about that,” he added. “And they should be.”

Of course, even if a vaccine is months away from being available, expect the Trump enablers to lie about one being just around the corner.

The happy talk doesn’t seem to be working on most voters.

Americans take an increasingly negative view of how their country’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic compares with the rest of the world, a new HuffPost/YouGov survey finds.

A 46% plurality of the public now says the U.S. is handling the outbreak worse than other countries, with 24% saying it’s handling the outbreak as well as other countries and just 19% saying it’s doing better than most.

The results reflect a continuing decline in confidence over the course of this year. A March poll found that just 28% of Americans thought the U.S. was handling the outbreak worse than other countries, while a May survey put that figure at 36%.

These results split along partisan lines.

A 71% majority of Democrats say the U.S. is doing especially poorly in its fight against the pandemic, up from 49% who said the same in March. Among Republicans, 19% share that judgment, up from just 2% in March.

Some 38% of Republicans and just 8% of Democrats currently think the U.S. is faring better than most other countries. In March, 12% of Democrats and 62% of Republicans thought the U.S. stood out positively.

The overall results suggests that independents are agreeing with the Democrats.

If you read nothing else today, please see How the Pandemic Defeated America by Ed Yong at The Atlantic. It’s not behind a firewall. It’s the best analysis of the pandemic response failures I’ve seen yet. See also Trump campaign nears point of no return and Trump gets an education in the art of reversal.

 

Trump Is the Dreamer Now

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This is just weird:

It was a bold claim when President Trump said that he was about to produce an overhaul of the nation’s health-care system, at last doing away with the Affordable Care Act, which he has long promised to abolish.

“We’re signing a health-care plan within two weeks, a full and complete health-care plan,” Trump pledged in a July 19 interview with “Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace.

Now, with the two weeks expiring Sunday, there is no evidence that the administration has designed a replacement for the 2010 health-care law. Instead, there is a sense of familiarity.

Trump promised great health care policy in 2016. The Republicans have been promising something on and off since the Clinton health care proposal crashed and burned in 1993. What their best minds put together turned into the blueprint for the Affordable Care Act, but since a Democratic president took ownership of that idea, the GOP disowned it. Since then Republican legislators have occasionally hauled stacks of paper in front of cameras that they claimed was their new health care policy proposal, but it never goes anywhere. See, for example, old posts from 2009 and 2014. The 2014 post asks whether such a beast as a Republican health care plan can exist, since there is no way to address our health care issues without the kind of tax-supported “big government” programs that are the root of all evil, they think.

This is from a 2013 Jonathan Chait article that’s worth reviewing.

Conservative health-care-policy ideas reside in an uncertain state of quasi-existence. You can describe the policies in the abstract, sometimes even in detail, but any attempt to reproduce them in physical form will cause such proposals to disappear instantly. It’s not so much an issue of “hypocrisy,” as Klein frames it, as a deeper metaphysical question of whether conservative health-care policies actually exist.

The question should be posed to better-trained philosophical minds than my own. I would posit that conservative health-care policies do not exist in any real form. Call it the “Heritage Uncertainty Principle.”

When pressed, Republicans trot out the same old tweaks to the system — high-risk pools, “tort reform,” allowing insurers to price gouge older and sicker folks — that no one who knows anything about how health care works thinks wouldn’t just make things worse.

It’s safe to say that there is no Trump health care plan and there cannot be a Trump health care plan. No one in Congress is working on a Trump health care plan. It’s possible Trump has Mr. Ivanka working on a health care plan, which means that one of these days we may be treated to the sight of another stack of paper filled with nonsense that won’t address the problems and will never be enacted.

Instead, it appears Trump has his staff — including Mr. Ivanka — working on a whiz bang executive order he can sign so he can pretend he’s done something.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who regularly meets and golfs with the president, said the health-care plan that Trump has referred to would come in the form of an executive order that Graham called “fairly comprehensive.” However broad, an executive order would fall short of a full legislative overhaul.

Graham said what Trump has in mind now would ensure that consumers do not risk losing their health plans if they get sick, but he did not give details.

“He’s pretty excited about it,” Graham said of the president. The ACA’s consumer protections for people with preexisting medical conditions is one its most popular facets with the public, and it is the one part of the law Trump consistently says he would preserve if he could get rid of the rest. How he could do that while containing costs after he and congressional Republicans remove the law’s requirement that everyone has to purchase health insurance remains the question.

The insurance companies aren’t going to agree to insure the preexisting condition folks unless they get something substantial in return. The mandate was the deal Obama offered. Short of substantial tax subsidies to underwrite the policies, which is way not Republican, I don’t see a deal getting made. More likely, Trump will demand that insurers offer policies to everybody, but at premiums nobody can afford.

Trump’s latest promise comes amid the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, which has infected millions, caused more than 150,000 deaths and cost Americans their work and the health benefits that often come with jobs. His vow comes three months before the presidential election and at a time when Trump’s Republican allies in Congress may least want to revisit an issue that was a political loser for the party in the 2018 midterm elections.

Yet Trump has returned to the theme in recent days.

“We’re going to be doing a health-care plan. We’re going to be doing a very inclusive health-care plan. I’ll be signing it sometime very soon,” Trump said during an exchange with reporters at an event in Belleair, Fla., on Friday. When a reporter noted that he told Fox’s Wallace that he would sign it in two weeks, Trump added: “Might be Sunday. But it’s going to be very soon.”

Steve Benen provides another detail:

Two weeks ago today, Donald Trump sat down with Fox News’ Chris Wallace in the White House Rose Garden, and the host asked about the president’s ongoing efforts to destroy the Affordable Care Act, which would strip benefits from tens of millions of families. The president replied that he still intends to “replace” the ACA.

The host reminded Trump, “But you’ve been in office three and a half years, you don’t have a plan.” It was at this point that the president responded with an unexpected vow:

“Well, we haven’t had. Excuse me. You heard me yesterday. We’re signing a health care plan within two weeks, a full and complete health care plan that the Supreme Court decision on DACA gave me the right to do…. [T]he decision by the Supreme Court on DACA allows me to do things on immigration, on health care, on other things that we’ve never done before. And you’re going to find it to be a very exciting two weeks.”

The Supreme Court decision on DACA? I missed that one. Apparently Trump believes this decision gives him the right to step in and enact policy by executive order if Congress hasn’t done it. Remember John Yoo? Trump has been listening to John Yoo.

Trump signed a bunch of executive orders on prescription drugs a few days ago that, among other things, called for price controls.

Commenting on how he had the authority to control those prices unilaterally, without Congress passing a law or an agency completing a formal rulemaking process, Trump said, “I was given that right because of the DACA decision. The DACA decision allowed me to do things that some people thought the president didn’t have the right to do. I was given that right. Drug prices will be coming down very, very substantially. No other president has been allowed to do that. No other president has been able to do that.”

Yeah, no. Trump has tried to snatch victory out of the jaws of the court’s DACA ruling, but he’s dreaming. Granted, it’s a dream shared by some influential conservative thinkers, but there’s no basis for it in the ruling.

The court found that DACA was more than just an administrative decision not to enforce immigration law against a group of people brought into this country as children by their parents. It also offered these “Dreamers” benefits, such as the ability to obtain work permits. Ending DACA, therefore, required reversing a substantive policy that had been in place and relied upon by hundreds of thousands of Americans for years. That sort of policy change is governed by the Administrative Procedures Act, which bars actions that are arbitrary, capricious and procedurally deficient. Because the Trump administration did not follow the APA in rescinding DACA, as in so many of its actions, its decision was invalid.

Trump turns the court’s reasoning on its head. Because the court focused on the legality of Trump’s reversal of DACA instead of President Obama’s adoption of the program, he seems to believe he can issue whatever orders he wants, and any future president attempting to undo what he’s done will have to jump through months or years of procedural hoops under the APA.

That’s hogwash. As Harry Litman ably explained in The Times, executive orders that launch substantive new programs have to comply with the APA, and anyone damaged by a Trump order can sue to stop it under that law.

Like I said, this is just weird. But price controls are something like original sin to the free market people. That we haven’t heard screaming from here to eternity tells us something. I’m not sure what.

The Trump Amateur Hour

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In the New York Times, Jim Tankersley asks, Does Trump Want to Save His Economy?

The United States just suffered its worst economic quarter in nearly 75 years. Its recovery from the depths of a pandemic-induced recession has stalled, as coronavirus deaths rise again across the country. President Trump has what appears to be one final chance to cut a deal with Congress to ensure hard-hit workers and businesses do not collapse before the November election.

He has shown little interest in taking it.

Rather than push for a comprehensive plan that could win support from both Democrats and Republicans, Mr. Trump has instead embraced big-ticket items that Senate Republicans did not want and that would do little to help millions of struggling workers and businesses.

That included a payroll tax cut and an expanded tax break for business lunches, along with $1.75 billion to rebuild the F.B.I.’s headquarters in Washington. He has derided efforts to find middle ground with Democratic leaders on a broad economic rescue package, declaring on Wednesday that “we really don’t care” about several possible parts of it.

And so on. To answer the question, I suspect Trump wants passionately to fix “his” economy. But it was never “his” economy; he has just been coasting on Barack Obama’s economy. Nothing Trump has done, including the massive tax cuts, have been particularly advantageous to the economy or changed any trajectories for the better. And now that the pandemic has tanked the economy, Trump has no idea what to do to fix the economy. He really doesn’t. He has no idea how any of this stuff works. It’s pointless to pretend otherwise.

Nothing will “work” as long as the pandemic is out of control. There’s a fascinating piece at Vanity Fair that I recommend. It’s not behind a firewall. In How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air,” Katherine Eban writes that Kushner and some of his privileged trust fund buddies spent March and April putting together a national testing strategy.

Inside the White House, over much of March and early April, Kushner’s handpicked group of young business associates, which included a former college roommate, teamed up with several top experts from the diagnostic-testing industry. Together, they hammered out the outline of a national testing strategy. The group—working night and day, using the encrypted platform WhatsApp—emerged with a detailed plan obtained by Vanity Fair.

Rather than have states fight each other for scarce diagnostic tests and limited lab capacity, the plan would have set up a system of national oversight and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and contractual roadblocks, and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks.

This was all being done without coordination with the government officials tasked with taking care of testing, and it’s likely Kushner’s merry band of entrepreneurs got in the way more than they helped. Even so, they did come up with a plan. But the plan was never announced. In the words of one participant, it went “poof into thin air.”

By early April, some who worked on the plan were given the strong impression that it would soon be shared with President Trump and announced by the White House. The plan, though imperfect, was a starting point. Simply working together as a nation on it “would have put us in a fundamentally different place,” said the participant.

But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the virus would soon fade away.

Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert. [emphasis added]

So, instead, Trump dumped the responsibility for testing onto the states. You know the rest of the story.  Seriously, none of these geniuses apparently grasped that viruses spread. Dr. Anthony Fauci testified to Congress this morning:

The Trump administration’s decision to leave coronavirus shutdown decisions to the states created a patchwork of policies that effectively only imposed restrictions on about half of the country, NIH infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci told a House hearing on Friday.

There’s also a long bit in the Vanity Fair article about a March requisition from the White House for 3.5 million tests from the United Arab Emirates, which was invoiced at $52 million. The order didn’t go through the usual government purchasing channels, so the invoice cannot be paid. Plus the tests were all contaminated, possibly because they were shipped without being refrigerated. Amateur hour all around.

We don’t know that Jared Kushner had anything to do with ordering the tests from the UAE, but this kind of cowboy “the hell with procedure” stuff is his standard modus operandi. I do wonder if these were the “millions of tests” that Mike Pence kept promising last March that never arrived anywhere.

Yesterday the White House announced a new initiative to address the pandemic. It’s called the “embers strategy.” Axios:

The Trump administration is sending increased personal protective equipment, coronavirus test kits and top health officials like Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx to coronavirus hotspots across the U.S. as part of a campaign called the “Embers Strategy,” White House officials tell Axios. …

… Public health surrogates will appear on local and regional television and radio to educate the public on mitigation tactics, including wearing masks, practicing social distancing, frequent hand washing and staying home when ill.

*They will focus on areas reporting positive rates between 5% and 10% to prevent them from slipping into a “hot zone” category of above 10% positive rates.

*The Trump administration is expecting to land around 200 media segments over the next two weeks, as Axios reported on Sunday.

Seriously? That’s the plan? This is supposed to reassure people that Trump is “refocused” on the pandemic, the article says. Seriously?

Going back to the Vanity Fair article, although the U.S. is testing more that it was, that’s still not enough, especially when results take too long.

Though President Trump likes to trumpet America’s sheer number of tests, that metric does not account for the speed of results or the response to them, said Dr. June-Ho Kim, a public health researcher at Ariadne Labs, a collaboration between Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who leads a team studying outlier countries with successful COVID-19 responses. “If you’re pedaling really hard and not going anywhere, it’s all for naught.”

At WaPo, Greg Sargent discusses the “embers” analogy.

The imagery of embers may seem unthreatening and even comforting. Indeed, that’s almost certainly the point — to create the impression that what remains of the coronavirus is a gentle glow here and there that you associate with your childhood camping trips.

Indeed, it would be surprising if this language hadn’t been poll-tested up the wazoo. The White House has tentatively been experimenting with this embers language for some time: Trump tweeted in June that our economy was vaulting back, and that any coronavirus “embers” would be “put out as necessary.”

And even earlier than that, Vice President Pence approvingly told governors that Trump has been describing what remained of the virus as “embers,” which was supposed to be persuasive and reassuring to them.

Since then, of course, the coronavirus has once again surged in many states across the country, especially in places such as Arizona, Florida and North Carolina, which will be crucial to Trump’s reelection hopes. At the same time, Trump continues to urge a rapid reopening.

In other words, the analogy is more about reassuring people that the pandemic is being taken care of rather than providing an accurate picture of the mess we’re in, or coming up with a plan for how to get out of it. Because they don’t know how to get out of it.

And while Trump wants to delay the election because of the pandemic, sending the kids back to school will work out just fine, they tell us. We are so screwed.

Going back to the economy — the economy is screwed for reasons that are bigger than Trump, of course. A big chunk of the Republican Party in Congress won’t do anything to save the economy because all of the fixes go against their beloved ideology.

Paul Krugman:

Trump, his officials and their allies in the Senate have been totally committed to the idea that the U.S. economy will experience a stunningly rapid recovery despite the wave of new infections and deaths. They bought into that view so completely that they seem incapable of taking on board the overwhelming evidence that it isn’t happening.

Just a few days ago Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economist, insisted that a so-called V-shaped recovery was still on track and that “unemployment claims and continuing claims are falling rapidly.” In fact, both are rising.

But because the Trump team insisted that a roaring recovery was coming, and refused to notice that it wasn’t happening, we’ve now stumbled into a completely gratuitous economic crisis.

Kudlow, Trump’s chief economic advisor, is an amateur. He somehow became known as an economist even though he has no graduate degree in economics and is always wrong. “He’s a die-hard supply-sider for whom corporate tax cuts are the highest goal,” it says here.  See also “A Used-Car Salesman, Both in Demeanor and Honesty”: Wall Street Isn’t Sold on Larry Kudlow’s Economic Delusions by William Cohan.

See also the New York Times editorial board, Mitch McConnell Could Rescue Millions. What Is He Waiting For? Bascially, they’re waiting for reality to reflect their ideology. As long as it doesn’t, they cannot act. They don’t know what to do.