The Hill – Page 5 – * Failed Pols

Donald Trump has failed this country over and over in the past 3 1/2 years, but the murder by police last week of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, along with the nation’s ensuing distress, offered Trump another opportunity to show up as president. Alas, Trump once again chose not to accept the opportunity.

Racism has always thrived in the United States. Donald Trump didn’t start it, and though he can’t singlehandedly stop it, either, he has a powerful platform from which he could condemn the systemic racism that infiltrates American institutions, and that has led to the brutality and murder of so many people of color, including George Floyd.

We’ve all witnessed how Donald Trump’s base hangs on his every word and places their trust in him, despite his cheating in business, cheating on his wife, degrading women, making fun of disabled people, telling more than 18,000 lies while in office (as documented by The Washington Post), and having a long list of corrupt close associates. Imagine if Trump said words that condemned the racism and supported those who want change. Imagine how his base might, though momentarily confused, begin to change their rhetoric.

Clearly, the above scenario is fantasy. But even if all Donald Trump did were to condemn the police violence against black people that has brought us to this point, or, if he even addressed the nation in some sort of attempt to be empathetic or induce calm, it might offer, even momentarily, some reassurance that there is, after all, someone in the White House who is trying to lead.

But Donald Trump has chosen not to condemn police violence against black people.

Trump has instead turned his condemnation toward the Democrat leaders of states and cities where protests have taken place. Trump has repeatedly told Democrat leaders in Minnesota, including Governor Walz and Mayor X, of Minneapolis, that they need to “get tough” on protests.

On Saturday, Trump tweeted, “Liberal Governors and Mayors must get MUCH tougher or the Federal Government will step in and do what has to be done, and that includes using the unlimited power of our Military and many arrests.”

On Monday, during a phone call with the governors, Trump called them “weak.” Though he berated governors and urged them to be “tough,” Trump himself had hidden in the White House bunker on Sunday, after crowds outside the White House became hostile. It’s possible that the Secret Service persuaded him to retreat to the bunker, but Trump has chosen to hide in a bunker, literal or figurative, each time the country has faced a crisis (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) that called for a president’s leadership.

And on Monday evening, as a group of protesters in Washington, D.C. demonstrated peacefully, Trump decided that, after hiding in the bunker over the weekend, he needed to show that he was a tough guy. It was more important for him to “dominate” the scene than it was to connect with the demonstrators and empathize with their pain.

At Trump’s bidding, and after Trump’s having just said a moment before that he was on the side of the protesters, U.S. Military Police moved in on the peaceful demonstrators. Without provocation, the MPs deployed tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the crowd. They were making way for Trump, who wanted to take a stroll through the park to a church so that he could pose for a photo op with a Bible in his hand and impersonate a godly president.

During Monday’s bizarre and disturbing spectacle, Trump also announced that the states should deploy their Army National Guard forces to help with the protests. If states don’t bring in the National Guard, said Trump, he’ll send the U.S. Army.

Despite beating his figurative chest about the protestors and proclaiming himself “the Law and Order President,” though, Trump has remained silent on the topics of police brutality and the police murder of George Floyd.

Now, as in the past, he points to, and magnifies every issue but the real one, taking to Twitter to promote divisiveness, blame, falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and, especially in the case of the current demonstrations, violence.

Earlier last week, in reference to the demonstrations and unrest in Minneapolis, Trump tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” which was widely seen as a threat to shoot demonstrators. Trump tried to walk back this comment on Twitter, saying that he really meant that shooting was a natural consequence of looting.

Donald Trump either doesn’t understand the difference between the peaceful protesters and the opportunistic looters and rioters, or he just doesn’t care. Or, more likely, he does understand the difference, and is taking delight in the confusion, rallying his base as he provokes the “opposition.”

When the difference between those who simply want to exercise their right to a peaceful demonstration, and those who only come to a demonstration for the looting and vandalism gets blurred, it also blurs the line between the good actors and the bad, giving false justification for the police to “get tough” on all demonstrators. It also perpetuates the narrative that black people who demonstrate, as well as those who demonstrate along with them on their behalf, are “thugs.” Trump knows all this.

The time for Donald Trump to step up and be a president instead of an inciter has passed. Trump has proven beyond doubt that he is not interested or able to take the country successfully through a crisis.

In the span of less than three months, Trump let the country fall into a pandemic that has now killed more than 100,000 Americans. In the span of one week, the nation, under Trump, has become a mass of violence, fire, and fury ignited by a brutal act of racism that Trump has not directly addressed.

We can, and must, vote to protect our unraveling nation from the likes of Donald Trump. With six more months till Election Day, and the country still in the throes of both COVID-19 and the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, however, it’s terrifying to think of how much more damage Donald Trump could do.

Trump tells governors to ‘dominate’ protesters | CNN [2020-06-01]

George Floyd riots: Donald Trump rushed to bunker as protesters surrounded White House | 7NEWS Australia [2020-05-31]

Donald Trump and his allies seem to know a lot about COVID-19— even more than the leading infectious disease, epidemiology, and public health experts. They purport to know so much that they can’t accept the input of an expert if it contradicts their own worldview.

During a Senate committee hearing about reopening the U.S. economy during the coronavirus pandemic, Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) even reminded Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, that he wasn’t the “end all” when it came to making decisions about public health. To be fair, Paul is himself a physician, though an ophthalmologist, not an expert in infectious disease, epidemiology, or public health.

Trump’s allies are fond of comparing COVID-19 with the seasonal flu, though evidence says otherwise. Since we first learned about COVID-19, Trump and many others have focused on early speculation that COVID-19 was just a bad flu. They continue to point to “statistics” showing that influenza causes tens of thousands of deaths every year in the U.S. In short, we should see it as just another virus— sure, they say, people die from it, but tens of thousands of people die each year from the flu.

A new paper authored by researchers from Harvard Medical School and Emory University, however, says that comparing the number of flu deaths with the number of COVID-19 deaths is like “comparing apples to oranges.” In comparing the actual number of flu deaths per week with the actual number of COVID-19 deaths per week, the authors found that the peak COVID-19 weekly death count is about 20 times higher than the average weekly peak flu death count..

Some of Trump’s allies seem confident that once you have coronavirus, you are immune, despite the fact that science does not yet have clear evidence regarding immunity. During the Senate hearings on Tuesday, May 13, Senator Rand Paul, who has had COVID-19 himself, stated, without citing any data, that he was pretty sure that he and others were immune once they had recovered from COVID-19. So, he posited, there was no reason why people like him (those who have had COVID-19) shouldn’t be able to go back to work, populate beaches, and go back to more normal interactions.

Though experts say it’s likely that there is at least some degree of immunity for people who have had the virus, there is no definitive evidence as to the degree of immunity. Making the assumption that once you’ve had COVID-19, you’ll never get it again may prove deadly, especially as the country relaxes its social distancing rules.

Chen Dong, a researcher who led a COVID-19 immunity study at the Institute for Immunology and the School of Medicine at Tsinghua University in Beijing, says, “The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) has only been circulating in human hosts for five or six months, which means that there is simply no way to know whether immunity to the disease lasts longer than that. How long immunity lasts is a big question…

People who assume they are now immune should take note: Chen also said, “Per our findings, we can only confirm that COVID-19 patients can maintain the adaptive immunity to SARS-CoV-2 for 2 weeks post-discharge.”

Trump’s allies continue to insist that if they don’t have an underlying condition, they don’t need to worry…ignoring the proliferation of hospitalizations of people who aren’t “high risk.” At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the common wisdom was that it was mainly the older population, people with underlying conditions such as heart disease, and immunocompromised people who had to worry about complications. Most others, we were told, would have mild or no symptoms if they contracted the virus.

We know now that anyone can suffer a severe case and/or complications of COVID-19. Take Dr. Joseph Fair, a physician and coronavirus expert who contributes to NBC News and TODAY. Fair, age 42 runs 5-10 miles a day, is clearly in good shape, and has no underlying conditions. Yet he was hospitalized with COVID-19.

“If it can take me down,” said Fair, “it can take anyone down.”

We’re discovering that COVID-19 can even take down our kids, who we’ve thought all along were virtually safe from any complications. An increasing number of children who have had a bout with COVID-19 are developing a serious and potentially deadly post-viral syndrome called multi system inflammatory syndrome. Though experts say the syndrome is not directly caused by the virus, it appears to be a result of the children’s immune response to the virus. Now that we know this, it will be interesting to see whether some of Trump’s allies who are in a rush to open schools will change their minds.

Trump and some of his allies continue to promote the drug Hydroxychloroquine as a “game changing” treatment, even though, after evidence showing cardiac risks prompted the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has now recommended against it use for treating treat COVID-19.

Incorrectly citing herd immunity, they also insist that we don’t need to be so cautious about opening back up—in fact, we may be even better off doing so.

Various Trump allies, including Rush Limbaugh, have promoted the idea of herd immunity as justification for ending measures such as lockdowns to prevent the spread of the virus.

Researchers David Dowdy and Gypsyamber D’Souza, of of the Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, write, “We have listened with concern to voices erroneously suggesting that herd immunity may ‘soon slow the spread’ of COVID-19. For example, Rush Limbaugh recently claimed that ‘herd immunity has occurred in California.’ As infectious disease epidemiologists, we wish to state clearly that herd immunity against COVID-19 will not be achieved at a population level in 2020, barring a public health catastrophe.

“Some have entertained the idea of ‘controlled voluntary infection,’ akin to the ‘chickenpox parties’ of the 1980s. However, COVID-19 is 100 times more lethal than the chickenpox. Someone who goes to a ‘coronavirus party’ to get infected would not only be substantially increasing their own chance of dying in the next month, they would also be putting their families and friends at risk.”

COVID-19 is currently killing 2,000 Americans per day. Trump and his allies pick and choose “facts,” even disproven ones, about the virus to conveniently support their worldview, frequently contradicting the data and recommendations of public health and infectious disease experts. Though Trump, his base, and many of his allies have disdain for science, they create their own “science” to support their desire to end lockdowns and protect their financial interests.

POWERFUL CONFRONTATION: Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci’s contentious Coronavirus exchange | The Hill [2020-05-12]

Fauci Clashes In Tense Moment At Senate Hearing | NBC Nightly News
[2020-05-12]

Category: The Hill

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Editorial: Trump Allies Have Their Own “Science”