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

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

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

Here ya go. pic.twitter.com/oXyQIvivT3

— David Weissman (@davidmweissman) April 27, 2020

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

Today he’s been cranking out gems like this:

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

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

And this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it ends this way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Credit: www.dailykos.com)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only a quarter of small businesses have received federal aid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just for the record, here’s a video of the segment of yesterday’s Trump Show in which Trump proposed injecting people with disinfectant. That’s what he said. Loudly and clearly.

And this is from the official White House transcript of yesterday’s Trump Show:

And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.

Is he not saying that we should try injecting disinfectant? Of course, that’s what he’s saying.

I’m bringing this up because the disinfectant remark was stupid even by Trump standards, and right-wing media is tripping all over itself claiming that he didn’t say what he said. For example:

I don’t dignify Breitbart with links, but the article says:

Trump used the word “inject,” but what he meant was using a process — which he left “medical doctors” to define — in which patients’ lungs might be cleared of the virus, given new knowledge about its response to light and other factors.

Let’s review:

And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.

Especially in the larger context, in which he also proposed shining lights into the body to kill the virus, there’s no mistaking that he was proposing injecting people with disinfectant.

A lot of people have called for the networks to stop broadcasting the daily briefings. Some of them have complied; The Trump Show has disappeared from my local NBC affilliate, possibly because it was pre-empting Jeopardy and viewers complained. I suspect there will be louder calls now to cancel the Trump Show before people start dropping dead from drinking Lysol.

The makers of Lysol want you to know you should not injest their product, btw.

But I’m wondering if we’re being hasty. If Trump wants to make a fool of himself on television, why get in the way?

There’s a long but fascinating article in the New York Times headlined Home Alone at the White House: A Sour President, With TV His Constant Companion by Katie Rogers and Annie Karni. This reveals a lot, including about the origins of The Trump Show.

The solution, aides said, came two days later, when Mr. Trump appeared in the Rose Garden to declare a national emergency and answer questions from reporters. As he admonished journalists for asking “nasty” questions, Mr. Trump found the back-and-forth he had been missing. The virus had not been a perfect enemy — it was impervious to his browbeating — but baiting and attacking reporters energized him.

This post is about Mitch McConnell’s suggestion that states facing budget shortfalls because of the pandemic should declare bankruptcy rather than receive federal funds. Mitch actually called relief funds for states  “blue state bailouts,” even though red states need funds, too. This inspired Rep. Peter King of New York to call McConnell “the Marie Antoinette of the Senate.”

My impression is that it’s broadly, but not universally, believed that a state couldn’t declare bankruptcy even if it tried. But let’s look at some background to see what’s going on here.

Something Paul Krugman wrote on April 16:

Tucker Carlson wouldn’t know a scientific record if it bit his ass.

Trump himself crudely nodded to this when he mused about quarantining off East Coast blue states, as if to protect virtuous Red America — often described as “Real America” by his propagandists — from infestation by an export from diseased Blue America.

It’s sometimes said you can predict the future by looking at the past and extending it. But the pandemic has scrambled the old trajectory. Maybe not completely, but close enough. All bets are off now.

Clearly, the pandemic has completely flummoxed Donald Trump. Kevin Drum points out that Trump is, literally, doing nothing at all about the pandemic.

Let’s review our president’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic:

* He has no plan for mass testing.

* He has already let everyone know he’s unenthusiastic about masks.

* He wants to “liberate” states from stay-at-home orders.

* He wants to open up non-essential businesses as soon as possible.

* He appears to have no particular opinion about social distancing, school closings, or large gatherings.

In other words, he literally has no concrete response to the pandemic at all, aside from closing our borders and passing along damaging fictions about vaccines and folk remedies.

Speaking as an armchair psychologist, my take on this is that Trump has absolutely no clue what he’s supposed to be doing about the pandemic, because it is utterly outside his very limited experience. And he is incapable of learning, so he’s not going to somehow salvage some initial mistakes with more proactive and effective policies. That would be like expecting a poodle to play the tuba.

Now Trump is flailing around trying to promote himself as a successful, tough-guy president without having accomplished anything to address the pandemic. His big strategy so far was a hail-mary pass — being the big hero who saves everyone with the miracle drug hydroxychloroquine! But after weeks of promotion, and after stockpiling 29 million pills, the hail mary turned into a fumble. So what’s next?

“Next” appears to be that Trump will revert to his original strategy of pretending his mightly mind-beams can just make the pandemic go away. There are reports he even wants to resume rallies.

But the lipstick-on-the-pig strategy is unlikely to work.

Donald Trump’s botched handling of the Covid-19 crisis has left the US looking like a “third world” country and on course for a second Great Depression, one of the world’s leading economists has warned.

In a withering attack on the president, Joseph Stiglitz said millions of people were turning to food banks, turning up for work due to a lack of sick pay and dying because of health inequalities.

The Nobel prize-winning economist said: “The numbers turning to food banks are just enormous and beyond the capacity of them to supply. It is like a third world country. The public social safety net is not working.”

I doubt most Americans grasp the depth of the trouble we’re in. There is still a lot of hope that in a month or two everything will go back to how it was. But that’s very unlikely. This disaster may be just getting started.

The November election is going to be a referendum on Trump’s handling of the pandemic. Trump is desperate for that to be otherwise, but there’s nothing he can do about it, or at least nothing he will do about it that won’t backfire. All other conventional wisdom is now cancelled. Republicans who assume turnout from Trump’s base will save them in November are in denial, as are lefties who are still arguing that Joe Biden can’t win without the progressive vote. It may barely matter who the Dem nominee is by November.

Do read Everyone is in denial about November by Daniel Drezner. In the face of the pandemic, Republican strategies about messaging and smearing Joe Biden for this or that issue just seem pathetic. “The important thing is that campaign tactics are meaningless when the administration has bungled its pandemic response and the economy is cratering,” Drezner writes.

The only thing that could save Trump is to successfully re-open the economy so that the pandemic is no longer an issue in November. His own incompetence has gotten in the way, however. The experts keep saying test! test! test! And Trump has washed his hands of tests. Instead he appears to be embarking on “Hail Mary 2.0: The Return to Prosperity.” Just push open the economy, now, without testing and tracing. Those governors who won’t comply might be subject to legal action from Attorney General Barr. The strategy appears to be to turn the pandemic restrictions into a red state versus blue state culture war issue, never mind that some Republican governors have seen the light about the restrictions.

But the public health experts say that reopening the economy prematurely will almost certainly result in another wave of virus deaths, possibly worse than the first wave. And as long as the virus is lurking out there, the crowds will not be returning to stadiums, shops, or restaurants even if they’re open. Some people, yes, but possibly not enough to turn a profit. And then when new cases flare up, the restrictions will have to be imposed again. See Matt Yglesias, Opening Up the Economy Won’t Save the Economy.

I have little hope that Trump won’t continue to screw up America. Trump doesn’t want to hear about the tests, possibly because even he suspects pandemic is more widespread than we know. Numbers might make him look bad! In his narrow little mind, mass testing is not in his self-interest.

But you can’t hide the reality of death. The officially recorded numbers of cases of and deaths from covid-19 are almost certainly lower than actual infections and deaths, but the low numbers are bad enough and going up fast. (I’ve added a link to the right-hand sidebar, right over the calendar, that provides a running update of the official number of infections and death by covid 19 in the U.S.. Checking the numbers daily is disturbing.)

There are signs that Trump’s support among seniors is eroding fast.

The latest Morning Consult poll found that 65-and-older voters prioritized defeating the coronavirus over healing the economy by nearly a 6-to-1 ratio. And over the past month, they’ve become the group most disenchanted with Trump’s handling of the crisis. In mid-March, seniors were more supportive of Trump than any other age group (plus-19 net approval). Now, their net approval of the president has dropped 20 points and is lower than any age group outside of the youngest Americans.

Those findings were matched by a new NBC/WSJ poll, which tested the presidential matchup between Trump and Joe Biden. Among seniors 65 and older, Biden led Trump by 9 points, 52 to 43 percent. That’s a dramatic 16-point swing from Hillary Clinton’s showing in the 2016 election; she lost seniors by 7 points to Trump (52-45 percent).

Greg Sargent:

The national backlash was fierce. And as one of the polls highlighted above shows, seniors continue to disagree in overwhelming percentages.

See also Trump loves to create chaos. But it can come back to bite him.

And do see Richard Stengel, Why Trump’s Coronavirus Optimism Isn’t Working.

The projection of optimism is a hallmark of great leaders, and FDR might have been our greatest model of that presidential virtue. But from the first he was clear that in times of crisis, optimism also required realism—realism in the form of honesty about the nature of the challenge itself. He understood that to engage a whole nation, he could not sugarcoat the task ahead. Optimism had to be earned. In President Donald Trump’s efforts to project optimism, he has been anything but candid and honest. To simply say, “We see light at the end of the tunnel,” without facts or data to back it up, is not optimism but dissembling. Optimism unaccompanied by realism is hollow. Trump’s optimism is more like that of the classic American species, “the confidence man,” the swindler who sells you a bill of goods and then moves on to the next sucker. Moreover, his optimism always seems self-serving, as though it is more about people rewarding him for being upbeat than how he is grappling with the crisis itself. As FDR said in the third paragraph of his inaugural address, “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.”

Trump sometimes tries to project seriousness and empathy, but he fails. He lacks genuine empathy or emotional intelligence. Further, Trump’s incessant self-pity and complaining about the way he is treated is totally out of keeping with great leadership, especially in a time of crisis.

Polls are saying that a significant majority of Americans are reluctant to rush into re-opening the economy. But some of Trump’s favorite governors are rushing in where angels fear to tread:

As several states — including South Carolina, Tennessee and Florida — rush to reopen businesses, the sudden relaxation of restrictions will supply new targets for the coronavirus that has kept the United States largely closed down, according to experts, math models and the basic rules that govern infectious diseases.

“The math is unfortunately pretty simple. It’s not a matter of whether infections will increase but by how much,” said Jeffrey Shaman, a leading epidemiologist at Columbia University.

And there is evidence the virus can spread through air conditioning systems. If true, this is going to be especially hard on the southern states.

This is going to be a year to remember. Stay safe.

U.S. President Donald Trump announces an agreement with Mexico on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) at the White House in Washington, U.S., August 27, 2018. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque – RC1D94FA7CB0

Update: The Constitution versus Bill Barr

This just happened. See Barr Threatens Legal Action Against Governors Over Lockdowns

The Senate just reached a tentative deal on another relief package, says the New York Daily News:

If you read nothing else today, please do see George Packer’s We Are Living in a Failed State at Atlantic. It starts this way:

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dys­func­tional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

And so on. Years of corruption, neglect, obstruction, program cutting, and economic inequality left us helpless to deal with with this pandemic in the manner befitting a first-world, industrialized nation, never mind the United States of America. Our federal government and many of our state governments are close to being utterly dysfunctional. Systemic change, anyone?

Not to say I told you so, but back in 2009 I wrote a post called “The U.S. as a Failed State” that holds up fairly well. And that links to a George Monbiot article in The Guardian that lamented our inability to address climate change. “Why do we treat the world’s most powerful and innovative nation as if it were a failed state, rejoicing at even the faintest suggestion of common sense?” Monbiot asks.

As many have said, the breakdown of effective government we are experiencing now has been a long time coming. Trump is a symptom, not the disease itself. However, he’s a late-stage symptom. It is particularly telling that all of our fail-safes built into the Constitution to remove a corrupt or despotic president, such as the 25th Amendment or impeachment, can’t work because there’s too much corruption in the rest of government to make it work. If the U.S. were a cancer patient, we’d be close to the point when the doctor says it’s too late to operate, but maybe we can get you into a research study.

Just one sign of our helplessness is that many of the so-called “stimulus” checks are lost in the system because over the years the IRS has been gutted. See Where’s your check? Ask GOP lawmakers. at the Washington Post.

Congress itself deserves much blame for the undercapacity of the IRS. Years of GOP defunding led to severe underinvestment in staff, technology and customer service, the folly of which is only more obvious now.

In normal times, the big problem with the Republican campaign against the IRS was that it led to lax enforcement of tax laws, which let cheaters skip out on paying massive amounts of money to the Treasury. Small amounts of funding spent to maintain a functional IRS would have yielded large amounts of income that the federal government was owed, at the same time ensuring fairness for the vast majority of Americans who obeyed the law.

Now the big problem is that Congress suddenly needs an efficient, staffed-up agency to help rescue the economy, but it must fight the downturn with the agency lawmakers built. Without the years of cuts, the IRS would be more capable of answering Americans’ many questions about confusing procedures to obtain their stimulus checks. It would also have had more capacity to build the technological tools it had to create on the fly to aid distribution.

Similar stories apply to many other government agencies. And then there’s our rickety health care system that’s been tooled to maximize profit over, you know, providing health care. After years of hospital closings — rural hospitals can’t make a profit, you know — and a large part of our population essentially cut off from health care because of no insurance, we are less able to deal with a pandemic than nations with a healtheir population and a national, taxpayer supported health care system. Bernie Sanders wrote in the New York Times recently,

The absurdity and cruelty of our employer-based, private health insurance system should now be apparent to all. As tens of millions of Americans are losing their jobs and incomes as a result of the pandemic, many of them are also losing their health insurance. That is what happens when health care is seen as an employee benefit, not a guaranteed right. As we move forward beyond the pandemic, we need to pass legislation that finally guarantees health care to every man, woman and child — available to people employed or unemployed, at every age.

The pandemic has also made clear the irrationality of the current system. Unbelievably, in the midst of the worst health care crisis in modern history, thousands of medical workers are being laid off and many hospitals and clinics are on the verge of going bankrupt and shutting down. In truth, we don’t have a health care “system.” We have a byzantine network of medical institutions dominated by the profit-making interests of insurance and drug companies.

So here we are. The old song from Hair seems to fit —

We starve-look

At one another

Short of breath

Walking proudly in our winter coats

Wearing smells from laboratories

Facing a dying nation

Of moving paper fantasy

Listening for the new told lies

With supreme visions of lonely tunes

Yesterday David Wallace-Wells wrote for New York magazine that The White House Has Erected a Blockade Stopping States and Hospitals From Getting Coronavirus PPE. I want to write more about that, mostly because it makes absolutely no sense unless you assume that at least part of the confiscated medical supplies are being re-directed into a black market, with Trump and his son-in-law getting a cut of the profits. Do read this for the details of how much has been confiscated by the feds. I’ll skip to the end:

The plan, obviously, is to reopen businesses as soon as possible so that the economy will be roaring by November, and Trump will get credit and be re-elected. Another facet of this plan is to blame the pandemic on China, and then tie Joe Biden to China, and Trump will be re-elected. Easy peasy.

Anita Kumar reports for Politico,

President Donald Trump and his aides aren’t just weighing coronavirus infection rates as they push for a quick economic restart. They think it’s good politics, too.

Trump aides and allies say they are growing confident that an earlier restart amid the coronavirus pandemic could help the president in his reelection campaign, according to six people close to the White House or Trump campaign.

They point to emerging signs around the country. Trump-supported activists are protesting strict stay-at-home orders. Conservative groups’ internal polling in red-leaning and swing states show a significant uptick in Americans who favor reopening the country. A growing chorus of Republican lawmakers across the nation are on board.

“If you don’t see something start to happen … you’re going to see a conservative revolt by our base,” said Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks, a conservative group which recently polled on reopening the economy. “The worst strategy for him is to keep things shut until August. Trump is basically going to win or lose his election right now, in the next month.”

Okay. What could go wrong?

If the consequences weren’t so high, this might be amusing. It’s a bit like watching someone deliberately step on a rake to see what happens. But of course they’re playing fast and loose with people’s lives, so it isn’t funny.

The right-wing media has been playing along, promoting the idea that the isolation measures are a gross overreaction and that the covid-19 pandemic is no more dangerous than past flu vaccines. And, always, the pandemic framework is framed as an “us versus them” issue — Donald Trump versus everybody else.

And as Trump’s incompetence and negligence has hamstrung the U.S. from sensibly returning to economic activity, the message has become let’s just do it, anyway. Trump briefly flirted with the conceit of being a “war leader” against an “unseen enemy,” but now he’s moved on to washing his hands of the whole mess. Being a national leader during a crisis is hard. Let’s just pretend the pandemic isn’t happening, or if it is happening, it’s not that big a deal.

Paul Waldman wrote,

It’s something he’s very experienced at. You have a big, splashy event in front of the cameras announcing that you’ve built the most luxurious hotel or golf course or casino the world has ever seen, and then if it goes bankrupt, you skedaddle out of town, leaving other people holding the bag. So now Trump is preparing to put that experience to work with the coronavirus pandemic and the economic crash it created.

A few days ago Trump was putting on a big “I’m in charge” act; now he’s telling the governors they’re on their own. Yesterday he was lashing out at governors because they were screwing up getting people tested. Apparently the next plan is to force the reopening of the country so that things can go back to the way they were, and if a few geezers in nursing homes don’t make it, blame Democrats.

So now social distancing is quickly becoming unpatriotic in some circles. For example: Rep. Jim Jordan, a guy we all came to know and not love during the impeachment hearings, is calling on the House Judiciary Committee to investigate governors who instituted strict social distancing orders.

Jim Jordan says the House should get back to work and conduct hearings on stay at home orders pic.twitter.com/ukABCU0C65

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) April 19, 2020

Now we’re seeing Trump supporters dutifully turning out to protest isolation measures.

The events — some, like in Michigan, featuring thousands of attendees — are organized largely by conservative groups calling state-based measures too draconian. Some of the groups have posted links and images on Facebook that downplay the seriousness of the virus. And other leaders have advocated against following CDC guidelines, like a ban on big gatherings and wearing face masks (because wearing them would be “counterproductive.”) Some of the protests have taken on the feel of 2016 Trump campaign rallies, with participants wearing Make America Great Again hats and waving flags emblazoned with the president’s face. …

… The displays are tapping into Trump’s main message on the coronavirus pandemic: governors are to blame for the crisis, not him. As the president ratchets up his reelection efforts, his argument is an effort to simultaneously put the brunt of responsibility for the coronavirus catastrophe on the shoulders of his political opponents while also maintaining that he holds “total authority” over the pandemic and the states facing it.

These people have been assured that the danger of the virus has been overblown; they have no clue what kind of risks they are taking. Will Bunch:

The everyday folks who were out there in Lansing or Columbus this week were largely there to serve the interests of the (mostly) rich and powerful people who used their influence to shoo them out there. Their agendas weren’t always the same. Most notably, President Trump — who promoted the rallies and even the right to carry weapons in an even-stunning-by-Trump-standards series of tweets — desperately wants to shift blame away from his multiple failures on the coronavirus and instead onto public-health-minded governors. Right-wing special interests, like the billionaire family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, are terrified that the 22 million unemployed will demand a social welfare state. Fox News is eager to make folks forget its dangerous ignore-the-virus punditry.

But the endgame and the shared interests are very much the same. Distraction, and a diversion of anger in the Heartland — an anger with legitimate and understandable roots — away from them, and hopefully onto the political enemies who threaten their power. If it all sounds painfully familiar, it should. This is the Tea Party Redux, except this time with the added thrill of a seeming death wish among the participants. Maybe we should call this one the Ventilator Party, or maybe the Branch COVID-ians.

Nobody who has any real understanding of either epidemiology or the economy thinks that restarting now is a good idea. Paul Krugman:

The thing is, as far as I can tell epidemiologists are united in the belief that it’s far too soon to be considering any relaxation of social distancing. The lockdowns across America do seem to have flattened the curve, allowing us to — just — avoid completely overwhelming the health care system. New cases may have peaked. But you don’t want to let up until you’re in a position to do so without giving the pandemic a second wave. And we’re nowhere close to that point.

So where is this coming from? I’ve seen some people portray it as a conflict between epidemiologists and economists, but that’s all wrong. Serious economists know what they don’t know — they recognize and respect experts from other disciplines. A survey of economists found almost unanimous support for “tolerating a very large contraction in economic activity until the spread of infections has dropped significantly.”

No, this push to reopen is coming not from economists but from cranks and cronies. That is, it’s coming on one side from people who may describe themselves as economists but whom the professionals consider cranks — people like Navarro or Stephen Moore, who Trump tried unsuccessfully to appoint to the Federal Reserve Board. And on the other, it’s coming from business types with close ties to Trump who suffer from billionaire’s disease — the tendency to assume that just because you’re rich you’re also smarter than anyone else, even in areas like epidemiology (or, dare I say it, macroeconomics) that require a great deal of technical expertise.

I could go on about the non-meritocracy we’re living in that allows cranks and idiots to be in charge, but I’ll save that for another time.

We’ve already seen that some nations that have been doing much better than us experienced a “second wave” of virus as they relaxed restrictions. We may have peaked in some places, but we’re possibly weeks away from peaking in other places, especially as the Trumpie protesters take their newly virus-loaded selves back to their neighborhoods.

This is not going to end well.

Anti-social distancing protesters in Michigan.

Something about this short video featuring Florida Governor Ron DeSantis completely sums up the current status of our coronavirus response. See if you can spot it:

Yes. Now on to our scheduled topic:

Some people are still arguing that covid-19 is no worse than seasonal flu. An argument I’ve seen lately is that 61,000 Americans died of flu during the 2017-2018 flu season, while (so far) only 30,000-something Americans have died from covid-19. And we don’t have to close businesses and such during the flu season.

Let’s break this down. Flu seasons vary; they last anywhere from five to seven months, usually from October to March or April. The first case of covid-19 in the U.S. was diagnosed on January 20, and the numbers are still going up. So we’ve just about ended the third month of covid-19 data.

But let’s look at some more data. In the 2017-2018 season, according to the CDC:

• An estimated 45 million Americans got the flu. Yes, 45 bleeping million.
• 21 million Americans got medical help for flu.
• 810,000 were hospitalized.
• 61,000 died.

That’s a very high number of deaths for flu, btw. Most flu seasons in the U.S., the number of deaths falls somewhere between 12,000 and 40,000.

Now, let’s look at covid-19. We have no idea how many people may actually have the virus, since there isn’t nearly enough testing. But as of the most recent data,

• Diagnosed coronavirus cases in the U.S.: 728,293
• Deaths: 38,244

I repeat — during the several months of the infamously bad 2017 flu season, there were approximately 45 million infected and 61,000 deaths.

During our three months of covid-19 in the U.S., we’ve had 728,293 diagnosed cases and 38,244 deaths. And the numbers are still going up. They went up by a few hundred just this morning while I was writing this post.

As math imparied as I am, even I know this ain’t equivalent.

Also, thanks to the flu vaccine that I faithfully get every fall, you have a choice to not get the flu. Although once in a while the people who make the annual flu vaccine miscalculate and don’t get that year’s dose exactly right, usually you can get your flu shot and then go your merry way, neither catching it nor spreading it. Vaccines make quarantines and stay-at-home orders unnecessary, except for anti-vaxxers. Were it not for the flu vaccine, the annual flu would be a much bigger problem than it is. Note that rates of vaccination in the U.S. had dropped significantly for the 2017-2018 season, which may be one reason that year was unusually bad.

I understand most seasonal flus evolve from common flu virsuses already in circulation. The last new virus we dealt with was the h1n1 or “swine” flu that emerged unexpectedly in 2009. Trump fans like to claim that President Obama botched that pandemic, but according to data from the CDC, “From April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, CDC estimated there were 60.8 million cases (range: 43.3-89.3 million), 274,304 hospitalizations (range: 195,086-402,719), and 12,469 deaths (range: 8868-18,306) in the United States due to the (H1N1)pdm09 virus.” That suggests the government handled that one pretty well in comparison to our current situation, seems to me. It also tells us the swine flu wasn’t nearly as dangerous as covid-19.

I got that flu myself, btw, before the vaccine was ready; it was a nasty flu. I didn’t need to be hospitalized, though. I understand the “swine” flu is still in circulation, but in populations with enough herd immunity it doesn’t pose a threat.

There have been other stupid comparisons of other-things-that-kill you and covid-19. The famous “Doctor Phil” McGraw didn’t exactly glorify himself with this one:

McGraw, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology, compared COVID-19 deaths to those from car crashes, cigarettes, and swimming pool accidents while arguing against the lockdowns that have impacted the nation’s economy in wake of the pandemic. While attempting to make a point that the country isn’t shutdown for those other deaths, McGraw incorrectly stated that 360,000 people die a year from swimming pool accidents. According to the CDC, “an average of 3,536” people die from “unintentional drownings (non-boating related) annually in the United States.” Which, I’m sure you gathered, is much less that 360,000. …

… The talk show host continued, “I get that, but look, the fact of the matter is we have people dying, 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 a year from swimming pools, but we don’t shut the country down for that but yet we’re doing it for this? And the fallout is going to last for years because people’s lives are being destroyed.”

I’m not going to look up the other stats, but I’m not sure how locking people up would reduce cigarette deaths, assuming people could still get their hands on cigarettes. But while there are many things one can do to reduce your exposure to various health risks — like not smoking — it’s unfortunately the case that you can’t fix stupid.

To repeat:

A Convention of Stupid