Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[barmar]

Ah, I have just seen that DT now thinks of himself as Captain Bligh. And I was worried that my comparisons with Nero and Queeg might seem extreme.

We are in very strange times.

And of course since Trump is stupid, he had no idea when making the comparison that Bligh was the villain of the movie and was thrown off the ship at the end. Despite tweeting that it's one of his favorite movies, he's probably never actually seen it (this is apparently the first time he's mentioned it when talking about movies).

[Winstonm]

Ah, I have just seen that DT now thinks of himself as Captain Bligh. And I was worried that my comparisons with Nero and Queeg might seem extreme.

We are in very strange times.

 

Queeg - I doubt highly if Trump is capable of geometric logic - but Ah, the strawberries, that's where he has them!

[Gerardo]

And isn't the irony just dripping off Trump's proposed May 1 opening of the economy - on the same day Russia celebrates its Mayday holiday.

 

Not only Russia.

 

May 1st is Labor Day in many countries.

[kenberg]

Various states are getting together. For example, from the midwest:

 

"We are doing everything we can to protect the people of our states and slow the spread of covid-19, and we are eager to work together to mitigate the economic crisis this virus has caused in our region," the governors said in a joint statement.

This is how serious people sound when they are addressing a serious problem. Trump totally bungled the initial response and he is now trying hard to bungle this next phase. If he will please, please, please just stay out of the way we might be able to get through this. Help from a president would normally be appreciated. From Trump, we just have to hope he does not come in and eff everything up too much.

[cherdano]

Various states are getting together. For example, from the midwest:

This all seems a great idea. However, isn't there normally also a lot of travel e.g. between the midwest and the East Coast? And so on - maybe they should go further and form a bigger group of states united in their action against Covid-19? Granted, at this point (with the group getting too big) they may have to elect a leader, and maybe eventually set out a document on how one would regulate interstate commerce more generally, handle foreign relations, etc. etc., but wouldn't that seem worth the effort in the long-term?

[johnu]

This all seems a great idea. However, isn't there normally also a lot of travel e.g. between the midwest and the East Coast? And so on - maybe they should go further and form a bigger group of states united in their action against Covid-19? Granted, at this point (with the group getting too big) they may have to elect a leader, and maybe eventually set out a document on how one would regulate interstate commerce more generally, handle foreign relations, etc. etc., but wouldn't that seem worth the effort in the long-term?

There are 7 states that don't have stay at home orders, and many others, most in the south, midwest, and mountain states that reluctantly imposed stay at home orders very late in the game because they were following the Manchurian President's lead in downplaying the seriousness of COVID-19, and are likely to be the 1st states to open back up. Maybe they can form a federation of states, suppose we call them the Confederate States.

 

And there are a group of other states that mostly acted very early for the US as a whole, along both coasts and along the northern border. Maybe they can unionize themselves into a cohesive group, suppose we call them the Union.

 

Sounds good to me.

[y66]

Hopefully the "rally round the flag" bump is dissipating and people are realizing how monumentally incompetent Trump and his administration are, in the face of this once-in-a-century crisis ... but it's probably just reversion to the mean.

 

Worst Gallup poll for Trump in 5 months:

43% approval (-6)

54% disapproval (+9)

[johnu]

Hopefully the "rally round the flag" bump is dissipating and people are realizing how monumentally incompetent Trump and his administration are, in the face of this once-in-a-century crisis ... but it's probably just reversion to the mean.

Clearly after an early bump in the polls to the high 40% and low 50% range, support for the Grifter in Chief has disappeared except for his core supporters.

 

 

Upset with Gov. Whitmer, protesters bring Lansing to a halt during 'Operation Gridlock'

 

FOX 2's Charlie Langton was social distancing among the crowd who told them they were not social distancing because it was their right not to do so but they understand the health crisis. They said they wish Gov. Whitmer had more faith in them not to get infected.

Stupid idiots, or idiotic stupid people?, ignore social distancing and stay at home orders to needlessly expose themselves to Coronavirus. I'm pretty sure this was organized by right fringe extremist talk show hosts on alt-right radio shows and websites.

 

The very fact that these idiots are gathering in close quarters, and most of them are not wearing masks (not even white robes and hoods) shows that they are incapable of social distancing on their own.

[shyams]

I have previously bored this audience by quoting betting odds of Trump winning a second term. Here is another quote from today.

 

As per a UK betting website, the current odds that Joe Biden will not be the Democratic Party nominee for President are quoted as 7.5% (rules: Nominee is the person chosen at Democratic National Convention. If, for any reason, this person is subsequently replaced before the actual elections in November, the outcome of the bet does not change).

 

In other words, if one bets $1,000 on Joe, one wins $75 if his name is formally on the ticket. Otherwise one loses the $1,000 placed.

 

Interesting! The market still factors a 7.5% doubt!!

[kenberg]

Clearly after an early bump in the polls to the high 40% and low 50% range, support for the Grifter in Chief has disappeared except for his core supporters.

 

 

Upset with Gov. Whitmer, protesters bring Lansing to a halt during 'Operation Gridlock'

 

 

Stupid idiots, or idiotic stupid people?, ignore social distancing and stay at home orders to needlessly expose themselves to Coronavirus. I'm pretty sure this was organized by right fringe extremist talk show hosts on alt-right radio shows and websites.

 

The very fact that these idiots are gathering in close quarters, and most of them are not wearing masks (not even white robes and hoods) shows that they are incapable of social distancing on their own.

 

 

The article says there were thousands. Suppose, just as a fantasy, that Trump had said to his followers early on, calmly but forcefully, and consistently, consistency is important, that this crisis is severe and that social distancing is an important part of dealing with it. He could have made it clear to his supporters that social distancing was very important to him, to Trump.

 

Sure, some of these idiots are beyond reach. But some, had Trump taken a responsible view of his influence with his followers, some of them would have listened to him. Maybe thousands could have been reduced to hundreds.

 

But yes, that sort of serious approach from Trump is a fantasy. Fake new, hoaxes, plots against himself, everyone in church for Easter, that's Trump's way. And we see the results.

 

I don't suggest that those who have followed Trump should suddenly become Biden supporters, although it does happen. I am suggesting that they take a realistic look at who Trump really is, and at the cost we are paying for it.

 

 

[johnu]

I have previously bored this audience by quoting betting odds of Trump winning a second term. Here is another quote from today.

 

As per a UK betting website, the current odds that Joe Biden will not be the Democratic Party nominee for President are quoted as 7.5% (rules: Nominee is the person chosen at Democratic National Convention. If, for any reason, this person is subsequently replaced before the actual elections in November, the outcome of the bet does not change).

 

In other words, if one bets $1,000 on Joe, one wins $75 if his name is formally on the ticket. Otherwise one loses the $1,000 placed.

 

Interesting! The market still factors a 7.5% doubt!!

Seems high, but maybe not totally unrealistic. First, mortality tables show about 3% chance of mortality in a year for somebody of Biden's age. Then there is the chance that he is incapacitated in some way before the election, a stroke, heart attack, accident, serious illness, etc. There could be a scandal that forces him out the race, but multiple serious scandals never forced the Grifter in Chief out of the 2016 race. The chance of a healthy Biden being replaced at the Democratic convention is pretty close to zero.

 

Longshots pretty much always get terrible odds from bookies. The longer the longshot, the more terrible the odds. Bookies don't want to go broke by huge bet on a big longshot that can't be laid off. For instance, my local baseball team is 500 to 1 against winning the world series. Honestly, they are closer to 5,000 or 10,000 to 1 against winning the World Series after trading away their best players in the last couple of years so they can rebuild (I still don't know how you can rebuild an awful team that was going nowhere, and get rid of the few good players and call it rebuilding).

[Winstonm]

Testing, testing, testing. Social distancing until testing. Damn, it's not that hard to understand.

 

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/antibody-research-coronavirus-widespread/story?id=70206121

[johnu]

Testing, testing, testing. Social distancing until testing. Damn, it's not that hard to understand.

 

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/antibody-research-coronavirus-widespread/story?id=70206121

According the Grifter in Chief, anybody in the USA can get ask for a COVID-19 test. Nobody ever said when they might actually receive one.

[Cyberyeti]

Testing, testing, testing. Social distancing until testing. Damn, it's not that hard to understand.

 

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/antibody-research-coronavirus-widespread/story?id=70206121

 

The UK has an antibody test that is reliable, but can only be done in small volumes (via the chemical/biological warfare labs at Porton down). They are using it to benchmark the home antibody tests, and the results are not good. I don't know if the results show false positives and negatives or just one of those, but 65% accuracy really doesn't cut it, not that much better than flipping a coin, and this is the problem atm till we get a better test.

[cherdano]

The UK has an antibody test that is reliable, but can only be done in small volumes (via the chemical/biological warfare labs at Porton down). They are using it to benchmark the home antibody tests, and the results are not good. I don't know if the results show false positives and negatives or just one of those, but 65% accuracy really doesn't cut it, not that much better than flipping a coin, and this is the problem atm till we get a better test.

I think the problem are the false positives. If 1% of the population is infected, but the test is positive for 5% of the non-infected one, and if you test everyone regardless of symptoms, then of course about five in six of those with positive tests would be false positives.

Obviously, you can increase your odds with a test with better specificity (low false negatives), or by increasing the percentage of the population that's infected - at least the UK is doing well on the latter... :ph34r: :blink:

[cherdano]

Any US constitutional lawyers here? Would it be treason to call for an armed rebellion against state governments? Asking for a friend.

[johnu]

Even in the dark shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Grifter in Chief continues his world class grifting.

 

Trump Campaign Secretly Paying $180,000 A Year To His Sons’ Significant Others

 

“A lot of people close to Donald Trump are getting rich off of his campaign,” said Paul Ryan, a campaign finance legal expert at the watchdog group Common Cause. “They don’t want donors to know that they’re getting rich. Because, at the end of the day, it’s donor money.”

 

Stuart Stevens, a top aide to 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign, was even more blunt: “That’s why Parscale has the job. He’s a money launderer, not a campaign manager.”

[johnu]

Any US constitutional lawyers here? Would it be treason to call for an armed rebellion against state governments led by Democratic governors in 2020 swing states? Asking for a friend.

Fixed your post

[cherdano]

Fixed your post

So it's only treason if you rebel against Republican governors?

[awm]

So it's only treason if you rebel against Republican governors?

 

I'm not sure it's possible for the king of a country to commit treason. Trump has declared his power to be absolute after all. And Congress already decided that the treasonous-seeming Ukraine affair was permitted behavior.

[kenberg]

There is a sense in which Trump seems to be beyond my expectations.

 

I had talked about Nero and Queeg, thinking maybe I was being extreme. Trump then speaks of himself as Captain Bligh.

 

Then with regard to the demonstrations in Michigan and elsewhere against social distancing, I comment that Trump could have used his popularity with his followers to stress the importance of distancing.. But then I find that it is not just that he did not try to calm them, rather he actively encourages the resistance to distancing. Free Michigan. Free Minnesota.

 

In 2016 I thought Trump was a horrible choice for president, worse than any we have ever had. Since then I have revised my opinion of him downward several times. I have still not reached the real Trump.

[Winstonm]

There is a sense in which Trump seems to be beyond my expectations.

 

I had talked about Nero and Queeg, thinking maybe I was being extreme. Trump then speaks of himself as Captain Bligh.

 

Then with regard to the demonstrations in Michigan and elsewhere against social distancing, I comment that Trump could have used his popularity with his followers to stress the importance of distancing.. But then I find that it is not just that he did not try to calm them, rather he actively encourages the resistance to distancing. Free Michigan. Free Minnesota.

 

In 2016 I thought Trump was a horrible choice for president, worse than any we have ever had. Since then I have revised my opinion of him downward several times. I have still not reached the real Trump.

 

In response to the coronavirus, the real Trump closed his eyes, put his fingers in his ears, and yelled, nyah, nyah, nyah, I'm not listening as loudly as he could.

[y66]

Eli Stokols and Janet Hook at LA Times: Trump and Biden clash over China in dueling ads

 

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s intensifying criticism of China isn’t just about deflecting blame during the coronavirus crisis — it’s opening up a new line of attack against Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee.

 

With the U.S. death toll surpassing 35,000 on Friday and the nation’s economy in a record-shattering swoon, Trump’s reelection chances now rest heavily on his ability to successfully frame the choice voters will face in November as a referendum on China, according to the president’s campaign aides and allies.

 

For Trump, it’s an update of the unapologetic nationalism he ran on four years ago, when he played up dangers supposedly posed by Mexicans and illegal immigration, and cast opponents as weak and naive. For Biden, determined to avoid Hillary Clinton’s fate, it’s a political and cultural minefield to distance himself from China without demonizing it as he makes his final bid for the White House.

 

Unwilling to let Trump’s arguments go unanswered, Biden’s campaign battled back Friday with a spate of ads disputing his alleged support for China, and going on offense — blaming Trump for being too trusting of President Xi Jinping as the coronavirus spread.

 

In a new video, Biden agrees that Chinese authorities were not honest about the early outbreak in Wuhan, and sought to cover up the contagion and the deaths. But Trump, he said, “is not doing enough about it.”

 

“The uncomfortable truth is that Donald Trump left America vulnerable and exposed to this pandemic,” Biden said. “He ignored the warnings of health experts and intelligence agencies and put his trust in China’s leaders instead.”

 

American Bridge, a major Democratic super PAC, put $15 million behind a separate TV ad that slams Trump for trusting and praising China and for shipping medical supplies to China when they remained in short supply at home.

 

With rallies and other physical campaigning on hold, the heated battle over China marked the first direct major engagement of the general election campaign.

 

The clash is playing out amid a pandemic that has put Trump in front of TV cameras at the White House every afternoon, and relegated Biden to remote TV and internet appearances from his home basement in Wilmington, Del.

 

Biden engaged after Trump’s campaign revved up political messaging focusing on the former vice president’s apparent ties to Beijing, in concert with efforts by the White House and its backers to blame China for the pandemic.

 

Internal research “shows that Joe Biden’s softness on China is a major vulnerability,” said Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign.

 

Biden, he said, “doesn’t view China as an economic competitor, he was critical of the president’s life-saving China travel restrictions, he has resisted holding China accountable for the virus outbreak, and his son Hunter entered business with a state-owned Chinese bank after he accompanied his then-vice president father on an Air Force 2 trip to Beijing.”

 

As part of a $10-million ad buy in swing states, America First Action, the principal super PAC behind Trump’s reelection effort, this week broadcast spots juxtaposing old clips of Biden speaking favorably about China, with allegations that Beijing “stole American manufacturing and hoarded our emergency stockpile.”

 

“Now more than ever, America must stop China, and to stop China you have to stop Joe Biden,” the narrator intones.

 

On Twitter, Trump allies have branded their likely general election opponent as "#BeijingBiden.”

 

“The Chinese Communist Party has infected the world, and crashed the global economy,” said Steve Cortes, a Trump supporter working with America First. The Chinese economy, the world’s second-largest, has also crashed due to the coronavirus, according to official data released Friday.

 

But Biden alleges in the video he released Friday that Trump has failed to confront Chinese leaders since the pandemic began, and that the president has left America ill-prepared to respond to the crisis.

 

The Obama administration, Biden argues, initiated a program to receive early warnings for outbreaks and kept a strong Centers for Disease Control and Prevention presence in China to sound the alarm — both of which Trump dismantled.

 

“We had an American official stationed inside the Chinese disease control agency serving as our eyes and ears,” Biden says. “President Trump left that position vacant as the outbreak hit. And when the coronavirus started to spread, the CDC wanted to get into China to get information that could save American lives. China said no, and Donald Trump didn’t insist on access.”

 

Trump, Biden continues, instead praised Xi because “he was more worried about protecting his trade deal with China than he was about the virus that had already come to America.”

 

In the last month, Trump has bulldozed past questions at nightly briefings about supply shortages and the lack of U.S. testing, even as some hospitals in New York City were overrun and the death toll spiked. He has focused instead on China’s culpability.

 

After weeks of referring to the COVID-19 outbreak as a “Chinese virus,” Trump in recent days has blamed Beijing for not sufficiently warning the U.S. about the outbreak in Wuhan in December and part of January.

 

“I was angry, because this should have been told to us,” Trump said Thursday. “It should have been told to us early. It should have been told to us a lot sooner. People knew it was happening and people didn’t want to talk about it.”

 

Trump barred visitors from China on Jan. 31, but did not declare a U.S. health emergency until March 13, six weeks after the Wuhan outbreak was public knowledge.

 

For months, Trump had credited Chinese President Xi for his response. Xi, Trump said on Feb. 23, was “working very hard. I think he’s doing a very good job.”

 

On March 27, after the global economy had begun to crater, Trump offered more praise, tweeting that “China has been through much & has developed a strong understanding of the Virus. We are working closely together. Much respect!”

 

This week, he said he was suspending U.S. funding for the World Health Organization, alleging that the United Nations public health agency had shielded China from blame and was slow to react to the outbreak.

 

Claims of a cover-up spread after Fox News, citing unnamed U.S. intelligence sources, suggested that the coronavirus may have accidentally escaped from a Chinese research laboratory, not a wet market in Wuhan as Beijing has said. No evidence indicates it is an engineered virus.

 

“It’s very clear now that the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization didn’t put that information out into the international space as they’re required to do in a timely fashion,” he said on Fox Business. “And the result of that is that we now have this global pandemic.”

 

Chinese officials attributed the increase to people who died at home because hospitals were too full, mistaken reporting by medical staff, and other confusion at the height of the crisis. “As a result, belated, missed and mistaken reporting occurred,” Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, reported.

 

The xenophobic strategy is an update on Trump’s 2016 campaign, when he played up dangers supposedly posed by Mexicans and portrayed himself as an unapologetic nationalist while denouncing his opponents as weak and naive.

 

But some Biden backers believe voters will find Trump’s sequel less convincing than the original.

 

“What Trump has been trying to sell, is this idea the Chinese misled him [about the coronavirus]. But the most you could say is they misled him for two weeks,” said Christopher R. Hill, a former U.S. ambassador who is supporting Biden.

 

“I’m more worried about where the U.S.-China relationship is going,” Hill added. “I’m less worried that Trump can turn this into an ace card in the election.”

[y66]

A month after reopening, all those protesters in Michigan and Ohio will be cowering in their houses hoping someone else will go out and get herd immunity for them, while calling for cutoffs of UI to force people back to work at businesses they manage remotely.

[barmar]

In 2016 I thought Trump was a horrible choice for president, worse than any we have ever had. Since then I have revised my opinion of him downward several times. I have still not reached the real Trump.

You really have to give it to him. We all thought he was horrid when he instituted the Muslim travel ban, praised white supremacists, and put children in cages.

 

Ever since he proclaimed that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and still get elected, I think he's just been testing just how low he can sink without losing support of his base. I have a feeling there may not be any bottom to this. There's a glimmer of hope, as his approval rating has sunk somewhat this week.