A few days ago, Trump opened his daily press briefing with a White House-made video intended to prove that he acted decisively to counter the coronavirus threat. The video was a response to a major story in the New York Times about his failure to take the virus seriously but to compare it to the common flu. Trump
smiled smugly as the taxpayer-funded tribute to Trump played.
As this story in the Intercept by Robert Mackey demonstrates, the video had a fatal flaw. Its timeline showed that Trump did nothing in the month of February, at a time when decisive action as needed.
The reporters were not fooled.
But, as CBS News correspondent Paula Reid pointed out to Trump after the video ended, there was a huge gap in the timeline: It mentioned absolutely no action by him in February and there was, as the Times had noted, a period of “six long weeks” after the travel restrictions until he “finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing.”
In fact, the only entry on the video timeline for February — the month Trump held mass campaign rallies and described criticism of his handling of the virus from Democrats as “their new hoax” — was February 6: “CDC Ships First Testing Kits.” The fact that those test kits were defective, a massive failure at a critical moment, seems like an odd thing to brag about.
Having seemed so pleased with himself while the video was playing, Trump looked stunned by Reid’s observation that its timeline showed the period of inaction the Times had described. “The argument is that you bought yourself some time,” by imposing the partial travel ban from China, Reid noted. “You didn’t use it to prepare hospitals, you didn’t use it to ramp up testing.”
As Trump interrupted to denounce her as “so disgraceful,” the correspondent pressed on to ask what, exactly, Americans were supposed to take away from his gauzy video tribute to himself? “Right now nearly 20 million people are unemployed. Tens of thousands of Americans are dead. How is this sizzle reel or this rant supposed to make people feel confident in an unprecedented crisis?”
Trump had no response but to shift back to praising himself for restricting travel from China in January. “But what did you do with the time that you bought?” Reid asked. “The month of February… the video has a gap.”
After the briefing, Eric Lipton, one of the authors of the investigation that so enraged Trump, observed on Twitter that nothing in the video or the president’s comments “undermines even a single fact in the stories we published over the weekend.”
“The truth remains that the nation’s top health advisers concluded as of Feb. 14 that the U.S. needed to use targeted containment efforts to slow the virus spread,” Lipton added. “Trump then waited until March 16 to announce his support for these measures.”
Thank heavens for the free press!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Isn’t this video a big violation of the Hatch Act? I am stunned that even the dummies who surround this biggest dummy of them all–the president–didn’t point that out.
Oh, yeah: this guy thinks he’s above the law.
Trump believes he is the state and is above the law.
As long as Moscow Mitch and the rest of the GOP parasites keep their majority in the U.S. Senate, Trump will do whatever he wants, and the Democratic majority in the House knows that they cannot legally do anything to stop him.
There are already grounds to impeach Trump again, but why bother when the GOP majority will make sure he doesn’t pay for his endless lies and crimes?
This is what I think: Trump will trample the U.S. Constitution every chance he gets, and I will not be surprised if he tries to stop the election in November and grab total power, ordering the police, National Guard and the U.S. Military to do what he says.
If that happens, only then will we find out who will have the courage to stop him.
With Moscow Mitch controlling the U.S. Senate, and if the five conservative justices in the U.S. Supreme Court do nothing or rule in Trump’s favor, there is one last resort.
But, that will bring on Constitutional Crises causing the federal government to collapse.
When that happens, the only people left with the power to counter Trump will be some of the governors and legislatures of the states, and hopefully most if not all of the colonels, generals, and admirals in the U.S. Military that will honor and uphold the oath they took as officers to defend the U.S.Constution against all enemies both foreign and DOMESTIC.
The Constitutional Oath for military officers, the FBI, The Secret Service, and the federal intelligence/spy agencies, et al. do not include language that they have to obey the president.
Some of the states and governors in the West and the Northeast have already acted in the last few days taking a stand against Trump.
“I, ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.””
The President is also required by the Constitution to take an Oath of Office. Article 2, Section 1, of the U.S. Constitution prescribes the Oath. It says, “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/commentary/2019/10/the-oath-of-office-and-what-it-means/
If Trump does what I think he is going to do and the GOP stands behind him along with some of the military and police, this country will be embroiled in a bloody civil war in 2021.
Just like Andrew Jackson! Oh wait. He thinks he’s Andrew Jackson! No coincidence that he keep AJ’s portrait in the oval office!
Yeah. HUGE violation of the Hatch Act for everyone who made the video. But not for the Orange Creep. The President and Vice President are exempt from the Hatch Act.
Thanks T.O.W. I had no idea.
My husband is a federal employee, so we know a lot about it.
Who do you think will enforce the Hatch Act violation? Bill Barr?
Excellent point….
That is all true and documented well.
However.
When I see and hear the abysmal ignorance of people
here in our residence, facts do not matter.
Don;t confuse me with facts, My mind is already made up.
The battle cry of those who support such idiocy.
Kudos to Paula Reid!!!!
Propaganda Minister Stephen Miller has been the Joseph Goebbels of the Trump Circus since BEFORE its beginning. See the Frontline documentary “Zero Tolerance,” which shows how Bannon, Miller, and Sessions looked around for a candidate to carry forward their white supremacist, anti-immigration agenda and settled on Trump the Chump. It’s a chilling behind-the-scenes expose.
I wonder if Miller oversaw the production of this piece. Is he now the maladministration’s Leni Riefenstahl as well? “The Triumph of the Shill” instead of “The Triumph of the Will”?
You know, Bob, the way Trump read that snake poem, it made me realize even clearer to me that he is no dummy. He read the poem very well, with no hiccups or rumbling, and exactly to suit his purpose.
I don’t agree about the reading. First, the poem is written in a 600-word vocabulary, so it’s even within Trump’s grasp. Second, he overacts in his typical demagogic fashion as he reads it, and this he has a lot of experience at. He’s a ham from way back. His reading would get a pretty low score at any junior-high-school speech meet.
I am reminded of hearing the same sort of thing said about the likes of Al Capone and John Gotti. “He’s no dummy.” Well, no. He is a dummy. There are lots of dummies who are relatively successful. Until they’re not.
I suspect, btw, that the poem was provided him by one of his preacher friends or by Stephen Miller. Trump doesn’t read. He can read, barely, but he doesn’t.
Trump has a kind of low cunning that he learned from his father. That’s about it.
Years ago, when I was a baby editor, I went to work for a publishing house that produced textbooks. It’s 12th-grade literature text contained an essay by an English historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, that claimed that Hitler was a diabolical genius. No, he wasn’t. The essay made me wonder whether Trevor-Roper had actually ever read anything by Hitler. The man’s writing was incoherent, rambling, full of lacunae and digressions, illogical in the extreme. Confused writing from a confused man. And, of course, many of his generals privately thought him an idiot who committed Germany to one disastrous plan after another.
One can be an idiot and a successful demagogue. This actually helps. Among these fascists, the one with the highest IQ was probably Mussolini. But a high IQ doesn’t mean that one has a developed moral sense. Joseph Goebbels was a playwright and had a Ph.D., with a specialization in Romantic literature. Stephen Miller is far smarter than Trump and as slimy a person who ever slithered across the face of the planet.
The press built a mystique around John Gotti. The Teflon Don, the Dapper Don. And some even imagined him to be a criminal mastermind. Then the tapes were released of Gotti talking on the telephone and in his prison cell. They revealed an inarticulate, crude, moronic, lowlife piece of scum, a cheap thug.
Trump is once again proving his lack of ability to lead. Gov. Pritzker, Illinois, had to charter a plane to go to China to get needed equipment. [I”m not a subscriber and couldn’t access this article.] Each state has to grabble around to obtain whatever it can get.
Gov. Pritzker spending $1.7 million on two flights to …
1 day agoGov. J.B. Pritzker has spent more than $1.7 million in state money on a pair of flights from China to bring back millions of pieces of personal protective equipment in the coming weeks as Illinois …
Search domain http://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-coronavirus-illinois-costs-20200414-u75kxw3o35bynnsdkepwchdyja-story.htmlhttps://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-coronavirus-illinois-costs-20200414-u75kxw3o35bynnsdkepwchdyja-story.html
High praise for Paula Reid’s courage and to the New York Time for bugging Trump and his allies so much that he made a big and sustained boo-boo on TV. It pains me to see Fox news but it worth doing to see how even some of Trump’s loyalists were stumbling around.
I posted Jennifer Senior’s article in the N.Y. Times where she said Trump’s daily briefings are sheer propaganda. I never watch them. He can’t tolerate reporters asking tough questions.
He can’t stand the heat and he should get out of the kitchen.
Yes, and thank heavens for the courage of these reporters!
Paula Reid has moved onto my Heroes List.
Mine too!
mathman: Absolutely! We need more journalists who don’t let Trump get away with his rambling incompetence.
Yeah, that was a great exchange. She really showed what the 1st amendment (and our nation) are really about. I think she made America greater again in those couple minutes that the Idiot-in-Chief has done in 3+ years.
And Trump has sought out every opportunity to blame people and organizations other than himself for his government’s slow coronavirus response. His comments Tuesday about the WHO fit into that pattern: “Many countries said, we’re going to listen to the WHO, and they have problems, the likes of which they cannot believe,” he said.
“A weak person blames others,” Pelosi said in a statement.
At the time for which he blamed WHO, Trump was saying the same as WHO.
And now he’s cut funding to the WHO. In the middle of a pandemic
It sounds horrible, but the amount Trump says he will withhold from the WHO is small compared to the total budget.
Proposed Program budget 2020-2021 = $4,840,400,500. (page 7) The report runs 97 pages.
$863 million of that $4.8 billion is slated for Polio eradication.
https://www.who.int/about/finances-accountability/budget/WHOPB-PRP-19.pdf?ua=1
In the next report from the WHO, France pledges US$100 million for WHO Academy.
In 2018-2019, the US (Congress not the President) pledged to contribute $656 million to WHO’s budget. Only $237 million was assessed by WHO. The rest was volunteered by the US Congress.
“The WHO has a budget around the size of a large U.S. hospital. It’s about one quarter of the budget of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” says Lawrence Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown University and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law, which is an independent agency that works with that WHO.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/15/834666123/trump-and-who-how-much-does-the-u-s-give-whats-the-impact-of-a-halt-in-funding
In February 2020, Trump wanted to cut U.S. FUnding to the WHO in half. It is clear from Trump’s previous actions since he has been president that he thinks he is in charge of how the US budget will be spent. He is wrong. Congress decides how much the budget will be and how it will be spent. However, with Moscow Mitch in charge of the Senate, Trump has not been challenged when he moves money around from one department to another one, mostly to build his wall that the Congress would not give him enough money for.
What Trump is doing is another one of his antics as he blames someone else or another agency in an attempt to cover up his own incompetence, narcissism, and ignorance.
False Prophe
Media-bashing robocalls, chloroquine Twitter trolls, briefing-room propaganda—how the president and his allies are trying to convince America he was right all along.
5:00 AM ET
…In the conservative media, talking heads and talk-radio hosts have labored to convince their audiences that—despite what they may have heard—the president never doubted the gravity of the coronavirus. Central to this case is Trump’s decision in late January to restrict travel from China, when the severity of the outbreak in Wuhan was becoming clear.
Skeptics on both the right and the left have dismissed the move as a token measure that did little to prepare the U.S. for an imminent outbreak. A more generous assessment may be that while restricting travel from China slowed the spread of the virus on the West Coast, Trump’s delay in restricting travel from Europe helped turn New York into the pandemic’s global epicenter. In any case, the policy is cited incessantly on Fox News as proof of Trump’s prescience. Sean Hannity has predicted that it will “go down as the single most consequential decision in history,” and mused, “How [much] worse could this have been if the president didn’t act that quickly?”
To sharpen their narrative, Trump’s allies have taken to juxtaposing his travel restriction with cherry-picked clips of journalists downplaying the threat of the virus earlier this year. Donald Trump Jr. recently shared such a supercut with his 2.6 million Instagram followers alongside an all-caps message: “THE MEDIA WANTS YOU TO THINK MY DAD DIDN’T TAKE CHINA VIRUS SERIOUSLY. WELL LISTEN TO THIS.”…
Read More:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/trump-coronavirus-message/610009/?utm_source=atl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=share
False Prophet
When I learn that someone is a supporter of IQ45, I ask myself, “What combination of qualities is this? of vileness (racism, sexism, greed, etc.), ignorance, and stupidity?”
Hillary was right.
deplorable is defined by racism, sexism, greed, ignorance, and stupidity
The Trump zombie ammosexuals
I think you left two words.
The Trump zombie ammosexual dystopia apocalypse
1600 Daily
The White House • April 15, 2020
The left is hoping you don’t remember . . .
President Trump and many governors, Republican and Democrat, are focused on getting America through this global pandemic and back to work safely. The left’s political class, meanwhile, is fixated on something else: dividing Americans for partisan gain.
The difference is that real leaders want results. Many are working with the President to achieve just that. Media pundits and Democrat leaders in Congress, on the other hand, are in the business of manufacturing conflict. They lose out if Americans unite.
Yet the left botched the Coronavirus story again and again. Now, they blame the President and hope you don’t remember how they fought him every step of the way:
The President formed a Coronavirus Task Force on January 29, when there were just a handful of confirmed cases in the United States. That day, The New York Times warned its readers to “beware the pandemic panic.” By the next day, Democrats were busy fighting each other over the impeachment spotlight.
President Trump restricted travel from China two days later. Democrat leaders called the ban “xenophobic” and unnecessary. The Washington Post published a piece that day: “How our brains make coronavirus seem scarier than it is.”
In an Oval Office address on March 11, President Trump spoke about the U.S. response and announced travel restrictions from Europe. Speaker Nancy Pelosi joined the media and other Democrats in questioning the action: “We’ll see whether it’s worth the trouble.”
The Trump Administration negotiated with Congress later in March to get immediate relief for working Americans through the bipartisan CARES Act. Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats stalled the Senate bill with their own list of demands—filled with partisan items that had nothing to do with Coronavirus.
There are more examples, but the pattern is clear: The left attacks President Trump for overreacting to Coronavirus, then later claims he didn’t do enough. It’s a classic Washington stunt, but it won’t work this time. Americans have seen these tricks before.
🎬 President Trump followed recommendations of health experts without delay
WATCH: Media minimized Coronavirus from the start
This is what our country has come to.
Mnuchin says Americans don’t need more than $1,200 to get by for a few months. Here is Mnuchin’s exchange on CBS Face The Nation with host Margaret Brennan two days after Trump signed the coronavirus relief bill:
Mnuchin: It’s really bridge liquidity for people as they go through these difficult times.
Brennan: Bridge liquidity for about eight weeks?
Mnuchin: Well, I-, I think the entire package provides economic relief overall for about 10 weeks.
………………………………………………………………
Video: Hundreds of cars line up for emergency supplies from Pittsburgh food bank
Hundreds of cars waited as long as five hours in line to receive emergency supplies from a food bank in the Pittsburgh area. CEO of the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank Lisa Scales joins Katy Tur to discuss the extra demand for supplies amid the coronavirus outbreak.
March 31, 2020
https://www.msnbc.com/katy-tur/watch/hundreds-of-cars-line-up-for-emergency-supplies-from-pittsburgh-food-bank-81450565967
I think Trump has infected his White House Staff with the narcissist virus.
$1200 is enough to support someone for a few months.
If we do not factor in the cost of water, trash pickup, utilities, insurance, car payments, house payments or rent, credit card payments, et al, maybe that would be enough to eat if all you did is eat beans and rice and drink water from the tap. No coffee. No tea. No chocolate, No nothing else but beans and rice … if you could find a supply.
Oh, yea, you might not have enough for toilet paper.
I would love to see multimillionaire Steve Mnuchin get by for a week on $1200. Or a day.
YOU ARE EXHAUSTING! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y29UowBa_Z4
Diane, would you consider running as Biden’s VP? Please?
I’d rather have her as education secretary. But then I wouldn’t know what’s happening in the World, since this blog wouldn’t continue.